After trying lots of different Ghost themes for my personal blog, I gave up. They were either bad-looking or too expensive. And that's where Flux comes in. I decided to create my own theme, and what a journey it was. In the beginning, I had no idea what I was doing (I even set up Babel and Webpack for it 🫠). It was a nightmare.
I tried to apply my experience creating React applications to Ghost, but it didn't work out. So I started once again, this time with Gulp, and it was surprisingly a joy. I wrote all the CSS in the old-fashioned way (no Tailwind, no CSS Modules). I rediscovered a lot of things and learned a lot on this journey.
When I launched my blog with Flux (you can see it at joaopedro.dev), it was full of bugs, but over time, I managed to fix them and improve it along the way.
This is why you shouldn't try, in this scenario, try to apply your React knowledge to Ghost. It's a totally different world. I had to learn a lot about Handlebars, and how to use it to create a theme. It was a great experience, and I'm proud of the result.
After using it for some time, I thought, "Why not sell it?" But I never had the time. Then in October, I lost my job at Hygraph, so I had some free time (definitely not the way I imagined 😂), and started packing it to sell.
What a journey once again! Creating a theme and selling it are two totally different things, but I figured things out. From setting up Stripe (the only way to receive money in Brazil - no Gumroad or Lemon Squeezy here), to creating a structure to send emails when the theme has an update, and much more.
Flux is a combination of several things. It's an opinionated and fast theme (I hate slow websites with lots of JavaScript), and most importantly: it was created to save you time, not spend hours and hours figuring things out as I had to.
I'm still improving it, every week. My plan for the future, if Flux goes well, is to sell more themes (and here comes Next Level Themes, the website you reading this post).
I hope you guys like it, and give it a try (if you live in a country where the dollar is too expensive — like Brazil — just shoot me a DM on X and I'll happily provide you a discount). My main goal here is to help you thrive, that's why I'm constantly improving it, after all, it's my personal website that uses Flux, so it's in my interest to have a great theme/experience for it!