Ghost 0.5.2 Adds Meta Data, Cover Images and More

The Ghost admin has had a design refresh with lots of bugs fixed and manyimprovements to the mobile view.

There’s now also an “About” page under “Settings”. The About page shows details about your setup such as Ghost version, type of database, environment and mail settings along with links to Ghost’s contributors.

Until now the Post Editing screen was occupied mostly by the editor and preview sections. The tags and save button were stuck at the bottom. This layout left no room to add anything else. Without changing the layout, a new post settings screen is added which opens from the side when the “Gear” icon is clicked. To close the settings screen, you can click on the “X” icon or click anywhere outside the settings section.

While not everyone would find this approach intuitive, it definitely has been implemented neatly giving it a more desktop or mobile app feel.
This approach also set the way for how new settings for post will be added in future.

Within the new Post settings screen, is a form to add a Meta Title and Meta Description for each post and also to get a preview.

To access this Post Meta screen, simply click on the “Gear” icon on Post editing screen and then on the “Meta Data” button.

A much awaited feature, Ghost now finally supports the ability set featured images for posts. Until now Theme developers have relied on JavaScript based solutions to retrieve and style a post cover image. But having it within the core makes it simpler for everyone.

To set a post cover image, simply click on the “Gear” icon in the Post Edit screen and then click on the “Add Post Image” area or drag and drop an image to it. The default theme “Casper” has been updated to use this feature.

Until now to be able to receive password resets, and new user welcome emails mail settings of 3rd party SMTP account had to be configured in config.js. While this still is the best approach, users can now receive notification emails without configuring 3rd party email service. The drawback of this is that there is a higher chance of your email getting blocked by spam filters.

• {{is}} helper
 This is a new helper to allow themes to detect certain context a template or partial is executed in. 

  • {{#is “home”}}-> true if we’re on the homepage, false on any other page

  • {{#is “tag”}}-> true if we’re on a tag page

  • {{#is “paged”}}-> true if we’re on page 2, 3, etc of the home or tag listings

  • {{#is “post”}}-> true if we’re on a post or a page. 

  • You can also check a complete list of context for {{is}} helper on Ghost’s GitHub Wiki.
• Custom Tag Template: 
Add the ability to create custom template files for custom tags. E.g.tag-notes.hbs, tag-video.hbs, etc.
• {{image}} for posts.
To display the feature post images, you could now add {{image}} within your theme template. Using the existing {{if}} helper e.g. {{#if image}} you can also check if a post cover image exists before outputting any HTML.
• Updates default “Casper” theme.
 The Default theme has been updated again to make use of post cover images.

You can check the official release announcement or the complete change log of Ghost 0.5.2 on GitHub.

Users of Ghost Pro (official Ghost hosted platform) would find their Ghost blogs already updated to this latest release. For self-hosted installs, you can download Ghost 0.5.2 and then follow these upgrading instructions on Ghost.org.

Ghost founders have been publicly sharing Ghost’s roadmap on Trello for the last few months.

Due to the nature of development, while the features marked for next release might not always be ready in time, the roadmap should just be considered as a reference for developers to see what’s being planned.

Based on the roadmap, some of the feature planned for next release are:

• Code injection into a theme’s header and footer via blog settings – A feature that would be useful to add code for Google Analytics or a commenting system.
• Open Graph Tags
• Post Auto save
• Post Filter Menu
• Better RSS
• Automated Sitemap.xml generation