Casper Astro
A modernized, high-performance port of Ghost's default theme Casper 2.0 rebuilt from the ground up on Astro 6 and TypeScript.
Casper Astro combines the timeless, clean, editorial aesthetics of the classic Ghost Casper layout with the industry-leading performance of Astro’s static site generation and zero-JS-by-default architecture. It delivers near-instant page transitions, 100/100 Lighthouse scores, and type-safe content management.
Key Highlights
- Blazing-Fast Astro 6 Engine: Server-side pre-rendering and static generation. Zero client-side JS is loaded by default, ensuring your content renders in milliseconds.
- Vanilla JS Interactivity: All legacy jQuery scripts (infinite scrolling, scroll progress bar, and floating headers) have been rewritten in clean, zero-dependency Vanilla JS and fully optimized for Astro’s client-side router transitions.
- 100% SEO Ready: Pre-rendered HTML containing complete metadata, canonical URLs, Open Graph tags for Facebook, Twitter Cards, and schema-compliant JSON-LD structured data.
- Type-Safe Content Validation: Fully validated markdown content schemas powered by **Astro Content Collections** and **Zod** for posts, tags, and authors.
- Responsive Media: Includes an optimized, native Vanilla CSS implementation to automatically scale embedded videos (YouTube, Vimeo, etc.) while preserving aspect ratios.
Feature Breakdown
Dynamic Infinite Scroll & Feed Pages
Experience smooth, uninterrupted reading with a custom infinite scroll mechanism implemented in raw Vanilla JS. Compatible with main post lists, tag-specific index pages, and author-specific index pages.
Algolia InstantSearch Integration
A lightweight search overlay comes preloaded and is toggleable. It queries your indexed posts in real-time, displaying highlighted search results inside the theme's native layout.
Compliance Feeds & Sitemap
Auto-generated compliance Atom XML feeds that perfectly match legacy Jekyll feed endpoints (`/feed.xml`, `/tag/[tag]/feed.xml`, and `/author/[author]/feed.xml`), making migration completely seamless.
Decap CMS Integration
A pre-configured admin panel (via Decap CMS / Netlify CMS) is included under `/admin/` so editors can draft markdown posts, manage tags, and configure authors directly from their web browser.
Disqus Comments & Lazy-Loading
Includes a native Disqus integration that uses the `IntersectionObserver` API to lazy-load comment threads only when readers scroll to the bottom of the page, ensuring fast initial page loads.
