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.

Blog posts are separate

Academy cleanly separates course lessons from blog articles. Blog posts use a dedicated article template — no course sidebar, no mark-as-complete button, no lesson navigation. Just clean, readable blog content with related articles at the bottom. Tag posts with "Blog" and they automatically appear in the Blog section.

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.

Theme features

For students

• Course catalog with browsing and search
• 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
• Blog section with related articles

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
• Separate blog template for non-course content
• Kitchen Sink article demonstrating all Ghost editor cards

Design & UX

• Warm, inviting color palette (cream background, amber accents)
• Outfit + Source Sans 3 typography (modern, highly readable)
• Responsive design — desktop, tablet, and mobile
• Dark mode color preview
• Accessibility-first — skip links, semantic HTML, ARIA labels
• 52 CSS custom properties for full design token coverage
• Back-to-top floating button
• Interactive/static badges on component demos

Component showcase

Academy includes a comprehensive Components page — a living style guide with 5 sections:

1. Design System — 16 color tokens with hex values, surfaces, dark mode preview, full typography scale, code blocks, buttons
2. Theme Components — Post cards, course cards, lesson cards, progress bars, instructor profiles
3. Ghost Editor Cards — All 15+ card types: images, galleries, embeds, bookmarks, callouts, toggles, header cards, audio, video, file, product, signup
4. Portal & Membership — Sign in/up forms, magic link, newsletters, pricing tiers with monthly/yearly toggle, content gates, member states
5. Custom Interactions — TOC sidebar, scroll reveal, share buttons, carousel with prev/next, pagination, progress tracking with JS API, page template previews (404, certificate)

Content types

The theme handles every Ghost content element. See the Kitchen Sink for a live demo of:

• H1-H6 headings with proper hierarchy
• Paragraphs with bold, italic, inline code, links
• Ordered and unordered lists (with nesting)
• Blockquotes (single and multi-paragraph)
• Tables with responsive overflow
• Images (normal, wide, full-bleed with captions)
• Photo galleries
• Syntax-highlighted code blocks (JavaScript, Python, CSS)
• Callout cards (tip, warning, important, success)
• Toggle/accordion cards
• Bookmark cards with rich previews
• YouTube embeds
• Button cards

Why Ghost for courses?

Get Academy

Academy is a one-time purchase. No subscriptions, no recurring fees, no revenue share.

• 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.