Post-installation tasks

Installing Ghost is so easy using ghost-cli and the installer does everything. Well, almost everything. Three things left for me to do on my Technicals blog:

1. Set up mail to allow resetting forgotten passwords
2. Adding Disqus commenting
3. Adding Prism code highlighting

1. Setting up mail

The Ghost documentation covers this here - https://docs.ghost.org/v1.0.0/docs/mail-config

Basically if you have a mailgun account then you simply edit the config.production.json (or config.development.json, as appropriate) and replace the "mail section" with something like the following

"mail": {
    "from": "'Test Ghost Blog' <test@two-drifters.co.uk>",
    "transport": "SMTP",
    "options": {
        "service": "Mailgun",
        "auth": {
            "user": "postmaster@mg.two-drifters.co.uk",
            "pass": "********************************"
        }
    }
},

Restart Ghost and head on over to the Labs section of the Ghost admin page to send a test email.

One minor annoyance is that I get such emails flagged with an 'unencrypted' icon within Gmail, despite mailgun using TLS security. This seems to be some interaction with GoDaddy's secureserver.net - I have an open problem with GoDaddy and will report back if and when resolved. It's more an annoyance than problem.

2. Adding Disqus commenting

If you use the default Casper theme this is already coded but commented out. Navigate to the content/themes folder and select your current theme. Then edit post.hbs and scroll down to the Disqus section and uncomment it -(the easiest way is simple to move the --}} line from the end of the section to the line before the <section class="post-full-comments"> line - so just the explanatory documentation is commented out.

There is one further change - locate the line s.src = 'https://test-apkdzgmqhj.disqus.com/embed.js'; and replace the test URL identifier with the Disqus identifier for your blog.

3. Adding Prism code highlighting

This is only necessary if you want to include code snippets in your blog. This Technicals blog will almost certainly do so. So, head on over to Prism http://prismjs.com/download.html, select the theme, languages and extensions you want to enable and download both the javascript and css files.

Now, navigate to your themes content/themes/ theme /assets folder and copy the downloaded javascript file into the js folder. Similarly copy the css file into the css folder.

To activate Prism you need to edit your theme's default.hbs file and add the following two lines to the appropriate section:

{{! Styles'n'Scripts }}
<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="{{asset "css/prism.css"}}"/>

{{!-- jQuery + Fitvids, which makes all video embeds responsive --}}
<script type="text/javascript" src="{{asset "js/prism.js"}}"></script>

Yeah, that seems to work!