Updating the blog's CMS to v5 and adjustments of my theme

On Friday evening, I started to research about upgrading Ghost. After a little trial and error, I got it working. Also, I adjusted the colors in the theme I am using.

Upgrading Ghost to version 5

Ghost version 5 is available for quite some time now, but since I just used image: ghost:4 in my compose file, watchtower always did upgrade just to new versions starting with 4.

Since I used the SQLite3 option when I installed Ghost in 2019, the automatic update by just switching to version 5 did not work, and the recommended update method is to reinstall the software.

And because the ghost backup command wasn't working correctly due to the missing sudo & ghost-cli user in the container, I was limited to reinstalling, which includes to back up the site data manually. I did use snapshots of my VPS too, just to be extra sure. When I had backed up all the files, it looked like this:

Then I just created a new directory, used this in my compose file as volume for /var/lib/ghost/content and updated the image tag to image: ghost:5.
At the first start I was seeing some SQL errors with docker logs -f ghost, the reason was that I now need to specify the usage of SQLite3 manually using env vars:

# recommended database__vars in v5 https://ghost.org/docs/config/?ref=maroonmed.com#database
        - database__client=sqlite3
        - database__connection__filename="content/data/ghost.db"
        - database__useNullAsDefault=true
        - database__debug=false

And now the blog started just fine, presenting the default theme of Ghost with no data. So I continued following the guide on how to restore the site data, which did work pretty well.
The only issue was that the latest article was not my last published one, it was a Coming Soon default article by Ghost instead:

So if you have subscribed to this blog by RSS, this is the reason why all articles, including a Coming Soon article, were unread in your RSS reader again on Friday evening.

But this was not the whole adventure of my upgrade, I was still seeing it with the default casper theme. When I activated my theme in the settings, this warning showed up:

So I adjusted my theme to fix most of the issues (the “Not all page features are being used error” error is still there but causes no problems) in this commit.

Changing the theme color

So now most work was done, but since I wanted to rework some color details in the theme, this was a good point to do it 🤗

The main reason for this is that I really like the color green, and the readability of the links in the top was not optimal. Here is what it looks like in comparison:

For now, it feels a little too bold, but this might just be because I am used to the old colors. We will see if I decide to change this again, since I never got any experience/knowledge in UX design...

Edit 25.05.2025:
Eventually, I got a little too addicted into redesigning. I fixed the typewriter animation of the header. It now looks a lot more fluid and is not jumping backwards on mobile anymore due to the usage of the max-width option with a different width filter and the ch unit 😀

Edit 27.05.2025:
Still at redesigning stuff around the blog, today I designed a new image for the Tesla Referral Link, but I need a place to host the SVG file. So how about in this post?