There are three primary ways to work with third-party services in Ghost: using Zapier, editing your theme, or using the Ghost API.

Zapier

You can connect your Ghost site to over 1,000 external services using the official integration with Zapier.

Zapier sets up automations with Triggers and Actions, which allows you to create and customise a wide range of connected applications.

Example: When someone new subscribes to a newsletter on a Ghost site (Trigger) then the contact information is automatically pushed into MailChimp (Action).

Here are the most popular Ghost-Zapier automation templates:

Editing your theme

One of the biggest advantages of using Ghost over centralised platforms is that you have total control over the front end of your site. Either customise your existing theme, or create a new theme from scratch with our Theme SDK.

You can integrate any front end code into a Ghost theme without restriction, and it will work just fine. No restrictions!

Here are some common examples:

• Include comments on a Ghost blog with Disqus or Discourse
• Implement MathJAX with a little bit of JavaScript
• Add syntax highlighting to your code snippets using Prism.js
• Integrate any dynamic forms from Google or Typeform to capture data
• Just about anything which uses JavaScript, APIs and Markup.

Using the Public API

Ghost itself is driven by a set of core APIs, and so you can access the Public Ghost JSON API from external webpages or applications in order to pull data and display it in other places.

The Ghost API is thoroughly documented and straightforward to work with for developers of almost any level.

Alright, the last post in our welcome-series! If you're curious about creating your own Ghost theme from scratch, here are some more details on how that works.