An illustration showing how a mix of Pixelglass (AI customization) and Fantasma (blocks) could be the perfect hybrid Ghost theme builder

What is Pixelglass?

A screenshot of the Pixelglass app with on the left the chat interface and on the right a preview of the custom Ghost theme

For a few hours I have been playing with Pixelglass. This is a specialized tool that helps people create their custom Ghost theme. Compared to Fantasma this tool isn't limited to the blocks provided by the team, instead you can create your own blocks and edit anything by having an AI do the code for you (a bit like Replit).

What's great about it?

There a few things that I really like about this tool:

Create advanced Ghost elements: You are not using pre-existing blocks and limited by those, you can describe very specific things and get them made by the AI.
Pricing: this isn't a subscription. You pay for AI credits upfront and can use them.
Preview with real data: You can connect your Ghost account and you can preview how the Ghost theme you are creating will work with the posts and pages you already have in your system. That's really nice to see if everything works.

What did I create with Pixelglass

A screenshot of the home hero section of the custom Ghost theme with a oversized search bar, and logos of customers

A screenshot showing a custom section with featured Q&A articles

A screenshot of a specific tag showing the recommended posts and a categorization of all the posts with that tag by their second tag

A screenshot of the blog which is a custom tag archive page that displays the posts with the tag "blog" in a completely different way, including a quick filtering menu based on the second tag of each post.

Why am I not using this new Ghost theme yet?

I've pushed the Pixelglass app really to its limits. I think it's not made for people who have 10 years of content including books, Q&A, templates, behind-the-scenes blog articles and want really advanced filtering options. That's why there are still some bugs that block me.

Speaking with the creator of the app, and seeing how is updating fast the app, I feel that in a few weeks the main problems could be solved.

Let's see how it goes. But until then, I've been playing around what I would build if I knew how to code:

What could be a nice hybrid between Pixelglass and Fantasma?

Building everything from scratch with AI is at times a bit of pain in the ass. Want to move a block, you need to describe the change. Want to have a fairly basic block, you need to describe it. Where Fantasma shines is that it has a bunch of pre-made blocks that you can add and adapt in just a few clicks without having to use AI credits. But Fantasma is quickly blocked when you want to do some advanced stuff, like showing a bunch of posts that are books in the form of book mockups.

I'm Swiss, so obviously I love a good consensus or middle ground. What to me could be an even stronger solution to these two tools is one that would do what both do:

A screenshot of a prototype made with Notion AI of a Ghost theme builder.

From Fantasma I'd take the LEGO block metaphor, where you add pre-made blocks that you can customize. From Pixelglass I'd take the idea of being able to create custom blocks with AI. Not everything needs to be built from scratch, but some things just need to be very specific.

The tiny personal touches I would add compared to Fantasma are the following:

More modules: columns, search, spacer, etc.
More design customizations: for each module I would add more detailed ways of changing the layout, for example by having custom padding on top and bottom that can be different.
More advanced logic: I would love to have a module that shows posts belonging to one tag, categorized by their second tag so that I can create an overview of the 400+ Service Design Q&A articles I have.

The fun thing that I didn't expect when creating this prototype with pure HTML, CSS and JS with Notion AI is that it can even make the export to a ZIP file of a Ghost Theme I can install. Sure it's buggy as hell but that was something I didn't expect was possible.