Casper: A Free Ghost-Style WordPress Theme Based on Underscores

Casper is a new theme for WordPress that is essentially a port of the default blogging theme for Ghost. Lacy Morrow built the theme using Underscores as a base. Morrow said that the goal for his theme was to approximate Ghost’s default theme while incorporating WordPress-specific features:

The goal of this project is to emulate the gorgeous theme while taking advantage of features exclusive to the WordPress framework.

Responsive images in the theme are handled by a lightweight (1kb) script that utilizes image replacement to load the correct image size for the visitor’s device.

The ability to add your own social URLs is built into the customizer, along with a handful of other options that enable you to:

Upload your own logo

Add a custom background image

Customize the header background, text, link and hover colors

Options to display header on all pages, make logo circular and frame logo image

While testing the theme, I noticed the header disappears on single posts. I’m not sure if its disappearance is a ghost-like feature or a bug. However, if you go into the customizer and select to display the header on all pages, the problem is easily solved.

Check out the live demo of Casper to see it in action. The theme also includes specific styling for quotes and code blocks. Morrow created the demo content using Jetpack’s Markdown module, but Markdown is not required in order to use the theme.

Casper is a fast-loading super minimalist WordPress theme that you can easily customize to add your own personality. Download it from github and upload the casper-wp folder to your WordPress themes directory. If you’d like to report a bug, request a feature or contribute to the code, get in touch with Lacy Morrow.