Willow - free, responsive and minimalist Ghost blog theme

Looking for a ghost blog theme? Here’s an open-source, responsive & minimalist theme I built for this exact blog. Get the Willow theme from my GitHub. I tried to keep the theme as lightweight as possible and the end result (for current 4.0 version) is 3.0KB of CSS and 820B of JavaScript. Vanilla JavaScript & no heavyweight CSS frameworks - normalize.css + what’s needed to make the theme look as it currently does.

Theme gets a little heavier when Disqus comments are added (which by default are disabled), so it is up to you, whether you want them enabled or not (see GitHub’s main page for a “how-to”). It’s super fast without Disqus (and fast with Disqus too). Update: starting version 4.0 conditional Disqus comments feature is added.

All-in-all, the purpose of this post is to showcase & describe the theme in details. Here are some theme screenshots:

The background image in the left sidebar (one on the top) is standard “Blog Cover” setting manageable via Ghost admin. The round image is “Blog Logo” setting. Title underneath sidebar images is the “Blog Title” setting. Description below it - “Blog Description” setting - these are all easily manageable.

Next line of social profile links (github, linkedin & email) and links in bottom block of sidebar are editable only via theme template file - see GitHub’s page for “how-to”. The bold links in sidebar (Home, RSS, Tags, etc) are Ghost’s navigation - these you can manage from admin panel.

Now getting a little more technical - theme is built using SASS and compiled via Grunt task runner, so you’ll need to have NPM & grunt-cli installed to modify styles (if you ever want to). SASS is written in BEM style and using ITCSS architecture - it’s a really great combination for creating maintainable SASS/CSS.

What I aimed for here is to have a theme that it as simple as possible, easily readable, minimal & clean. Well, here is the link once again - https://github.com/raivis-vitols/ghost-theme-willow - check the page for docs and downloads. Feel free to create issues, pull requests or ask me any questions! I hope you find this theme useful! Cheers!