About Academy
A Ghost theme built for educators
Academy is a premium Ghost CMS theme designed specifically for online course creators, educators, and training platforms. It transforms Ghost's native publishing features into a complete learning management system — without plugins, databases, or external dependencies.
How it works
Courses are tags
Every course in Academy is a Ghost tag. Create a tag, add a description and thumbnail, and you have a course. No custom post types, no database migrations. Ghost's built-in tag system gives you everything you need: course titles, descriptions, thumbnails, and automatic lesson grouping.
Lessons are posts
Each lesson is a standard Ghost post tagged with its course. Write in Ghost's beautiful editor with images, code blocks, toggles, embeds, and more. Lessons are automatically numbered and ordered by publish date within each course.
Progress tracking
Students can mark lessons as complete using the "Mark as Complete" button. Progress is tracked in the browser's localStorage — no server-side tracking, no cookies, no GDPR concerns. The student dashboard shows completion stats, progress bars, and course status at a glance.
Membership tiers
Ghost's built-in Stripe integration handles all payments. Academy supports three content visibility levels:
- Free — Available to everyone. Great for introductory courses that build your email list.
- Members — Requires a free account. Captures email addresses for your newsletter.
- Premium — Requires a paid subscription. Your advanced, high-value content.
Completion certificates
When a student completes all lessons in a course, they can view a completion certificate. The certificate displays the student's name, course title, and completion date — a satisfying milestone that encourages course completion.
Theme features
For students
- Course catalog with search and browsing
- Lesson sidebar with numbered syllabus and progress
- Table of contents auto-generated from lesson headings
- Mark lessons complete with visual progress tracking
- Student dashboard with stats and course progress bars
- Completion certificates
- Mobile-responsive course navigation
For course creators
- Zero-code setup — courses are tags, lessons are posts
- Ghost's beautiful editor for rich lesson content
- Three-tier content gating (free, members, premium)
- Built-in Stripe payments — no revenue share
- Email newsletters sent automatically on publish
- SEO-optimized with clean HTML and structured data
- Multiple instructor support with author profiles
- Custom settings panel — change hero text, colors, social links without code
Design
- Warm, inviting color palette (cream background, amber accents)
- Outfit + Source Sans 3 typography (modern, highly readable)
- Responsive design — works on desktop, tablet, and mobile
- Dark mode support
- Accessibility-first — skip links, semantic HTML, ARIA labels
Why Ghost for courses?
| Feature | Ghost + Academy | Teachable | Thinkific |
|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly cost | $9-15 | $39-199 | $49-199 |
| Revenue share | 0% | 0-5% | 0% |
| Transaction fees | Stripe only (2.9%) | Stripe + platform | Stripe only |
| Email newsletter | Built-in | Requires integration | Requires integration |
| Blog | Built-in | Separate | Limited |
| Custom domain | Yes | Yes ($) | Yes ($) |
| Data ownership | 100% yours | Platform-dependent | Platform-dependent |
| SEO control | Full | Limited | Limited |
Get Academy
Academy is a one-time purchase. No subscriptions, no recurring fees, no revenue share. You buy the theme once and use it on any Ghost site.
- Price: $99
- License: Single site
- Updates: Included
- Support: Email support for 6 months
- Compatibility: Ghost 5.x and above
Built by KONTEMI — premium Ghost themes for modern publishers.