GTCA

The Ghost Theme Configuration Approach: a unified method to allow Ghost blog admins to configure your themes.

Ghost themes which support GTCA provide an easy-to-use method of configuring social profile links, commenting, analytics and more for blog admins. More than that, they are interopable: if an admin has configured their blog for one GTCA theme, it should work with another one with zero re-configuration.

Motivation

See the original blog post for the rationale behind this and a more in-depth discussion.

My theme supports GTCA!

You're a star. You should include something either in your theme or your theme's download page that tells people it's a GTCA theme. This helps popularise the standard and allows interested blog admins to find out more.

An easy way to do this is to use a shields.io badge:

[![gtca button](https://img.shields.io/badge/configured%20with-GTCA-brightgreen.svg)](https://github.com/unwitting/gtca)

The spec

Is simple. Your theme must meet a few requirements to be able to claim adherance to GTCA:

• window.__themeCfg = {}; must exist somewhere in the code (or some functionally equivalent code that makes sure an empty __themeCfg object is assigned to the global scope).
• The above initialisation must come strictly before {{ghost_head}}. This allows configuration via header code injection.
• For any supported configuration property, document clearly to the user (either via their console logs, or in your theme help files) how to enable / set each one. This must assume little technical experience.
• You mustn't make use of properties which aren't in the list below. Using non-standard properties fools your users into thinking they're getting more interoperability between themes than they really are. If you need properties that aren't on the list yet, please raise a PR and it'll almost certainly be added nice and easily.

GTCA configuration properties

Here's the current list of supportable GTCA properties. To get more added, raise a PR against this README! The point isn't for me to control the list, it's for there to be a list. Further social profiles, extra external integrations are all welcome. We just need to ensure that the configuration item/s allow for the full functionality to be achieved.

Social profiles

• __themeCfg.bitbucketUsername
• __themeCfg.deviantartUsername
• __themeCfg.facebookUsername
• __themeCfg.flickrUsername
• __themeCfg.githubUsername
• __themeCfg.instagramUsername
• __themeCfg.linkedinUsername
• __themeCfg.pinterestUsername
• __themeCfg.soundcloudUsername
• __themeCfg.twitchUsername
• __themeCfg.twitterUsername
• __themeCfg.vimeoUsername
• __themeCfg.youtubeUsername

Analytics

• __themeCfg.googleAnalyticsId

Commenting

• __themeCfg.disqusUsername

Publishing

• __themeCfg.alternateSubscribeLink - defines an alternative to the built-in RSS link (ex: Feedburner feed)