How to Customize the Publication Info Sidebar in Ghost's Source Theme

The "publication info sidebar" is the homepage element in Ghost's default Source theme that displays your site title, description, and a subscribe button. You can toggle it on or off from Ghost Admin under Settings > Design & branding > Homepage, but changing what it says or does (like swapping "Subscribe" for a donate button) requires editing the theme's Handlebars files directly. There's no admin toggle for that part.

If you've searched this exact phrase, you're probably one of three people: someone who wants the sidebar gone, someone who wants to change its text or link, or someone whose Table of Contents setup just broke it. This guide covers all three.

Quick answer

What is the publication info sidebar, exactly?

It's a homepage-only component in Source, Ghost's official default theme since v6.9.3 (theme v1.5.0 is what most current threads reference). It sits alongside your post feed and shows your publication's title, description, and a subscribe CTA. It's controlled by a {{#if showSidebar}} conditional, which is why toggling it in Admin is straightforward but changing its contents isn't.

Ghost's own Source theme documentation confirms this is intentional: Source is designed to offer a highly configurable theme that can accommodate almost any publication style, all without needing to write a line of code, but that configurability is scoped to what the theme's package.json exposes as custom settings. The sidebar's copy and button destination aren't among them.

How to hide the sidebar (no code)

This is the only part of this that's a genuine toggle:

1. Go to Settings > Design & branding
2. Click Homepage
3. Find Show publication info (sometimes labeled "Show publication info sidebar" depending on your Ghost version)
4. Toggle it off and save

If your sidebar disappeared unexpectedly with this setting still on, that's almost certainly a CSS conflict, not a bug. See the TOC section below.

How to change the sidebar's text or button (requires code)

Ghost's own community has confirmed the fix path for this. The subscribe function inside the sidebar lives in a different file than the subscribe CTAs elsewhere on your site, which is why editing one doesn't accidentally break the other. Per a resolved thread on Ghost's developer help forum, the sidebar code comes from partials/post-list.hbs, specifically the {{#if showSidebar}} block, and this code only affects the sidebar since other subscribe sections come from partials/cta.hbs instead.

Steps:

1. Download your active theme's source files (Settings → Design & branding → Change theme → export, or pull from your theme's GitHub repo if you're using Source directly)
2. Open partials/components/post-list.hbs
3. Locate the {{#if showSidebar}} block
4. Change the button text and href to whatever you need (donate link, external newsletter, custom URL)
5. Re-upload the theme as a .zip through Ghost Admin

⚠️ This does not affect the subscribe CTAs that appear elsewhere on posts or pages. Those are separate partials. If you want to change those too, you'll need to edit partials/cta.hbs separately.

Why the sidebar disappears when you add a Table of Contents

This is one of the most common complaints tied to this exact search. Adding a TOC via custom CSS or a third-party snippet frequently collides with the sidebar's own CSS class, .gh-sidebar. When a TOC tutorial reuses that same class name (a common mistake, since it's a generic name), the browser applies whichever style loads last, and one of the two sidebars vanishes.

The practical fix, confirmed by Ghost forum contributors working through this exact issue: use a distinct class name like .toc-sidebar instead of reusing .gh-sidebar for your TOC styling. Renaming the class in your custom CSS resolves the conflict without touching the theme's core files.

If you're not comfortable editing .hbs and .scss files to chase this down, that's a reasonable place to stop and ask whether hand-editing theme partials is really where you want to spend your afternoon. Which brings up the actual tradeoff worth naming.

Ghost requires code for this. Typeflo doesn't.

This whole exercise (finding the right partial, understanding what {{#if showSidebar}} touches versus what it doesn't, renaming CSS classes to stop two elements from colliding) is a normal day in Ghost theme development. Ghost is a genuinely strong CMS, and its transparency about where its code lives (the forum literally tells you the exact file path) is a real strength.

But it's still code. Every visual change to a Ghost sidebar element means opening a .hbs file, understanding Handlebars conditionals, and re-uploading a theme zip to test it. If that button text is wrong, you edit the file again.

Typeflo was built to skip that step entirely. Sidebar elements, CTAs, and page components are editable through the dashboard directly, so changing a button's text or destination link is a form field, not a deploy. That matters most for content teams and solo bloggers who don't want a developer on standby every time marketing wants to swap a CTA. If you're evaluating whether Ghost's theme model fits your team, our Ghost alternatives guide breaks down where Ghost is still the right call and where it isn't, and our Ghost vs Substack comparison covers the platform beyond just its theme layer.

Typeflo's plans start at $19/month (Pro at $39/month, Scale at $99/month), with a 14-day free trial if you want to see the difference between editing a sidebar and editing a .hbs file firsthand.

Our approach to this article

My name is Hrithik Kaul. I am the founder of Typeflo, a blogging and content platform built for SEO and AI search visibility. I have spent five years doing SEO across content teams, startups, and client projects, and I've worked hands-on with Ghost theme customization at a previous company. For this piece, I reviewed the resolved threads on Ghost's own developer forum where the exact file paths and fixes were confirmed by Ghost community moderators and experienced theme developers, rather than guessing at undocumented behavior.

FAQ

Does Ghost's Source theme let me hide the publication info sidebar without code?
Yes. Go to Settings → Design & branding → Homepage and toggle off "Show publication info." This is a native Admin setting and requires no file editing.

Which file controls the publication info sidebar in Source theme?
The sidebar's markup and logic live in partials/components/post-list.hbs, inside a {{#if showSidebar}} conditional block. This is separate from the subscribe CTAs found elsewhere in the theme, which come from partials/cta.hbs.

Why did my sidebar disappear after adding a Table of Contents?
Most TOC tutorials use a .gh-sidebar CSS class, which is the same class the publication info sidebar uses. The conflict causes one to override the other. Renaming your TOC's class to something unique, like .toc-sidebar, resolves it.

Can I add custom content like recent posts or tags to the sidebar?
Not through Admin settings. It requires rebuilding the sidebar partial manually in the theme's .hbs files, and there's no built-in support for dynamic content blocks like recent posts inside that specific component.

Is this the same sidebar as the one described in "Publication Info" under General Settings?
No. Settings → General → Publication Info controls your site's title, description, and metadata globally. The sidebar discussed here is a homepage-specific display component in the Source theme that happens to show some of that same information.

Do I need to know Handlebars to make any of these changes?
To toggle the sidebar on or off, no. To change its text, button, or fix CSS conflicts, yes, at least enough to identify and edit the relevant .hbs or .scss file and re-upload your theme.