Almanac
A personal Ghost theme for essays, notes and a digital garden: a writing heatmap, everything listed by year, growth stages, sidenotes in the margin and a Wander button.

// overview
About Almanac
Almanac is for people who write in public: essays, short notes and pages that grow over time. A writing heatmap shows the last twelve months at a glance, entries are listed by year, and sidenotes sit in the margin like a well-kept notebook.
Who it is for
- You write for yourself first, and publish in public
- You mix long essays with short notes
- You like to come back to posts and improve them
- You want a quiet, text-first site that loads fast
Probably not for you if
- You run a magazine with lots of photos — see Marlowe
- You write fiction in chapters — see Verse
- You publish a newsletter first — see Riot
Pages and layouts
Page templates: Archive, Garden, People, Membership, Signin, Signup, Account.
Extra post layouts: Note.
Getting set up
- Archive: create a page with the slug archive and the Archive template. The Everything, by year button after each post links to it.
- Notes: for a short post, add the internal tag #note and choose the Note template. Give all notes the same public tag (for example Notes) as their first tag so the older/newer links follow the notes.
- Growth stages: add #seedling, #budding or #evergreen to any post.
- Start here: mark your best posts as Featured; the first five appear in the homepage side column.
- Upload the theme zip in Ghost Admin → Settings → Design, then fill in the theme settings.
- Import the sample content if you want to start from the demo and replace it with your own posts.
What you download
- The theme, ready for Ghost 6.0 or later (almanac_1.0.0)
- Documentation in HTML
- Sample content you can import into Ghost
- 12 months of updates and support from the people who built it
Requirements
A Ghost 6 site: Ghost(Pro) on a plan that allows custom themes, or self-hosted Ghost. Memberships and paid tiers use Ghost's own members feature and its Stripe connection; the theme adds the pages and the paywall design. Demo photos are not included in the download.
// features
What's included
- Writing heatmap: the last twelve months as a calendar of squares, darker for essays than for notes, each square linking to that day's entry
- Everything, by year: the homepage, tags and authors list entries as dated rows with a heading for each year, even across Load more
- Growth stages from internal tags: #seedling, #budding and #evergreen show as small marks on rows and posts, with a legend
- Sidenotes: write ((like this)) and the text becomes a numbered note in the margin on wide screens, and a tap-to-open note on phones
- Planted and last tended dates: posts show when they were published and, if edited later, when they were last tended
- Notes stream: short posts with the internal tag #note get their own row style, a sidebar stream and a Note template
- Note post template: an index card with ruled lines and links to the older and newer note
- Wander: a dice button that opens a random post, in the header, after every post, in the footer and on the 404 page
- Today's almanac line under the site name: weekday, date, week and day of the year, in the reader's language
- Start here, garden beds and growth stages in the homepage side column
- Archive, Garden (tags with their newest entries) and People page templates
- A dot-grid paper look in light mode and a night-ink dark mode, with a reader toggle
- Membership page with tiers and a monthly/yearly switch; styled paywall for members and paid posts
- Sign in, sign up and account pages
- Self-hosted fonts (Crimson Pro, DM Mono)
- Fully translatable, 17 theme settings, no jQuery
Compatibility & tags
Changelog
v1.0.0 · 2026-09-30
- First release.
// faq
Questions about Almanac
No. Almanac is a theme for Ghost, the open-source publishing platform. It needs a Ghost 6 site, either on Ghost(Pro) with a plan that allows custom themes, or self-hosted Ghost.
No. You upload the zip in Ghost Admin and change colours, homepage sections and text in the theme settings (17 of them). The documentation walks through every setting. Custom CSS is optional.
Yes. The theme includes a membership page with your tiers and a monthly/yearly switch, a styled paywall for members-only and paid posts, and sign-in, sign-up and account pages. Payments run through Ghost's built-in Stripe connection, so you keep your subscribers and your revenue.
Yes. Every word the theme shows comes from a translation file, so you can translate it into your site's language.
The regular licence covers one website that you or your client run. The extended licence is for a single end product that you sell to others, for example a paid product where buyers receive a site built on the theme. If you are unsure which one you need, contact us before you buy.
Yes. Our Ghost theme install and setup service puts the theme on your Ghost site, sets your colours, navigation and homepage, connects memberships and imports your content. See the services page for the price.
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