Theme Installation
Follow the steps below to upload the theme:
- Log in to your publication admin section at
yoursite.com/ghost/
- Go to Settings > Design (
yoursite.com/ghost/#/settings/design/
) - Click Change theme and then click Upload theme and select the
crimson.zip
file. - After the upload is complete click Activate
Routes Setup
routes.yaml
file.Follow the steps below to upload the routes.yaml
file (The file is located inside the zip)
- Log in to your publication admin section at
yoursite.com/ghost/
- Go to Settings > Labs.
- Click on
Upload routes YAML
button and select the file from the root directory of the theme.

The routing file defines the following custom routes and collections:
/
- the homepage (home.hbs
)/authors/
- custom template to show all authors/tags/
- custom template to show all tags/latest/
- custom template to show all posts/archive/
- custom template to show post archive/contact/
- custom template to show contact page with contact form
Custom Settings
The theme comes with custom design settings accessible from the Ghost Admin panel. To view and edit these settings, go to Settings > Design ( yoursite.com/ghost/#/settings/design/
)
Custom settings are defined in the package.json
file. These settings are placed under three categories:
- Brand settings
- Site-wide settings
- Homepage settings
Brand settings
- Site Description: Add your site description which will be used as meta description in Google Search results.
- Accent Color: Select an accent colour. This will be used as the accent colour for Light mode.
- Publication Icon: Upload a square, transparent icon for your brand. This will be used as Favicon.
- Publication Logo: Upload a logo for your brand.
- Publication Cover: We are not using the cover image, so you can keep it blank.
Site-wide settings
- Default color scheme: Select the default colour scheme. Choose from
- Light: Light theme
- Dark: Dark theme
- System: System theme of the website visitor
- Logo for dark mode: Logo for dark mode. Ensure the dimensions are same as that of your default logo.
- Accent color for dark mode: Select an accent colour to be used in dark mode.
- Pagination style: Select from "Load More" button pagination or "Next and Previous" style pagination.
- Primary font: Choose from 7 Google fonts. Used for headings and titles.
- Secondary font: Choose from 9 Google fonts. Used for the rest of the body and paragraphs.
- Contact form endpoint: Add your Formspree form endpoint. E.g. https://formspree.io/f/abcxyz
Homepage settings
- Tag slugs to show on home: Comma separated tag slugs to be shown on the homepage sections. Ideally, select up to 7 slugs.
- Home tag section layout: Select the homepage tag section from a single row layout, two column layout with 2 each or in a 1|3 layout.
Dropdown Navigation
This theme supports dropdown navigation.
To add a dropdown navigation, follow these steps:
- Add a parent menu item that will link to '#'.
- Now add multiple menu items prefixed with '-'.
Consider the example below, where we created 'Custom Pages' as a dropdown navigation item with 4 sub menu items.

The resulting menu will render like the below:


Editor's Choice Section
To add a post to the Editor's Choice section, simply add the internal tag "#editors-choice" to the post. This section will display at most 4 posts.

Trending Ticker Section
To add a post to the top Trending Ticker section, simply add the internal tag "#trending" to the post. This section will display all the posts with that internal tag.

Multilingual Ghost Publication
Crimson v1.02 and above provides functionality to make a multilingual (multiple languages) Ghost publication.
The theme supports two additional languages - Hindi and Spanish out of the box.
Please note that there is no automated translation. For that, you can use third-party services like Weglot. For each language, there will be a separate article written in that language.
Experience a truly multilingual experience in Crimson by changing the language in the top header at https://crimson.themeupstudio.com/

Multilingual Settings
To enable multilingual features, toggle the "Enable multilingual features" button in Site-Wide settings

- Locales: Add comma-separated values for language and country codes in the format: lang-country. For example, to add the English language and show the flag for Great Britain, please add 'en-GB'. The country codes are to show the flags for the corresponding languages. If you will write articles in American English, then it would be better to add 'en-US'. It will then show the USA flag with the English language.
- Main Locale: Add the primary language in which your root domain will post articles. The default is 'en' for English.
- Main locale URL: Add your root domain URL. E.g. https://www.example.com or https://example.com
- Auto redirect on locale: If enabled, the website will automatically redirect visitors to the website in their browser language.
When a language switch occurs from any page, the theme automatically generates all the necessary code and redirects to the correct language page.
For any assistance regarding making a true multilingual website using this theme, please get in touch with me at https://www.themeupstudio.com/contact/