empress-blog

There are lots of powerful things you can do with the Markdown

If you've gotten pretty comfortable with all the basics of writing in Markdown, then you may enjoy some more advanced tips about the types of things you can do!

As with the last post, you'll want to be looking at the source directly on github or in your local editor as you read it so that you can see all the Markdown code we're using.

Special formatting

As well as bold and italics, you can also use some other special formatting in Markdown when the need arises, for example:

• *escaped characters*

Writing code blocks

There are two types of code elements which can be inserted in Markdown, the first is inline, and the other is block. Inline code is formatted by wrapping any word or words in back-ticks, like this. Larger snippets of code can be displayed across multiple lines using triple back ticks:

Full bleed images

One neat trick which you can use in Markdown to distinguish between different types of images is to add a #hash value to the end of the source URL, and then target images containing the hash with special styling. For example:

which is styled with…

This creates full-bleed images in the Casper theme, which stretch beyond their usual boundaries right up to the edge of the window. Every theme handles these types of things slightly differently, but it's a great trick to play with if you want to have a variety of image sizes and styles.

Reference lists

The quick brown fox, jumped over the lazy dog.

Another way to insert links in markdown is using reference lists. You might want to use this style of linking to cite reference material in a Wikipedia-style. All of the links are listed at the end of the document, so you can maintain full separation between content and its source or reference.

Full HTML

Perhaps the best part of Markdown is that you're never limited to just Markdown. You can write HTML directly in the Ghost editor and it will just work as HTML usually does. No limits! Here's a standard YouTube embed code as an example:

empress-blog does not, and will never have the concept of user roles!

This is because it is entirely a static system. You can assign authors to posts and generate new ones using ember generate author but if you need full user permissions (outside of something like Github) and collaboration features I highly recommend that you sign up for a hosted Ghost instance.

It's a good idea to fill out the metadata on authors, including bio and social links. These will populate rich structured data for posts and generally create more opportunities for themes to fully populate their design.

empress-blog currently only supports 2 themes, the default Casper template and the Attila template. If you want to swap between templates it is as simple as installing a different npm dependency 🎉

The empress-blog documentation recommends that you use the default theme called Casper, which is designed to be a clean, readable publication layout and can be easily adapted for most purposes. The empress-blog-casper-template is a direct fork of Ghost's official Casper repository so it aims to be as close as possible to the original.

If you are interested in writing your own theme for empress-blog you can get started using

and it will create a brand new template addon in the folder empress-blog-template-name-template! You can check out the documentation for create-empress-blog-template here. As Ghost uses handlebars it is not too difficult to port an existing Ghost template to use Ember templates, so if you have any requests for an existing open source Ghost template please let us know 👍

If you do end up writing an empress-blog template please let me know on Twitter so I can include your template in a list of existing templates.