Editorial

Editorial is a free, open-source Ghost theme that brings HTML5 UP's news-oriented design to the Ghost publishing platform, centered on a dynamic locking sidebar for content-centric sites.

What is Editorial?

Editorial is a Ghost theme ported from the original HTML5 UP template by @ajlkn, now maintained by the Ghost Foundation. It takes Ghost's posts, pages, tags, and authors and renders them through a magazine-style layout with a toggleable sidebar that locks in place as you scroll. The theme is distributed on GitHub under a dual MIT and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license, and a live demo is available at https://editorial.ghost.io.

Key Features

• Dynamic locking sidebar — a toggle that fixes the sidebar while the main content scrolls, giving the theme its signature editorial feel.
• Handlebars templates — built on Ghost's templating language with documented files: default.hbs, index.hbs, post.hbs, page.hbs, tag.hbs, and author.hbs.
• Custom one-off templates — create page-about.hbs, tag-news.hbs, or author-ali.hbs by adding a content slug to the template filename, enabling per-page, per-tag, and per-author designs.
• Sass styling — includes a Ghost-specific Sass file (ghost.sass) appended to main.sass, plus the original responsive styles preserved for future updates.
• Developer workflow — build and test with pnpm commands: pnpm install, pnpm dev, pnpm zip to produce a production zip in /dist, and pnpm test to run compatibility checks against the latest Ghost version.
• Dual license — MIT and Creative Commons Attribution 3.0; the CC license requires keeping the footer attribution.

Who is it for?

• Publishers and bloggers — launch a magazine-style Ghost site with sidebar navigation and a locking sidebar for long-form reading.
• Ghost theme developers — study a clean, well-commented Handlebars theme with custom templates and a Sass build pipeline.
• Content-heavy organizations — use news-oriented layouts that prioritize articles and tag/author archives over fluff.

What can you do with Editorial?

• News outlets: build a front page that groups posts by tags and uses the locking sidebar for persistent navigation while readers scroll articles.
• Portfolio sites: use custom page templates (for example page-about.hbs) to give different sections unique layouts without editing core theme files.
• Ghost developers: modify styles in Sass and run pnpm zip to package a redistributable theme, or pnpm test to verify compatibility with Ghost's latest version.