Section layouts

Every homepage section row is shaped by one #home-* internal tag on its recipe page. This page is the catalogue: the nine layout recipes, plus the #home-ad ad row, which shares the same recipe-page mechanics but renders an advertisement instead of stories. For how recipe pages work and the step-by-step setup, see Homepage sections.

The layouts are listed in precedence order, from #home-feature-package (highest) down to #home-standard-4-column-grid (lowest). If a page somehow ends up with two #home-* tags, the higher-listed layout wins. (#home-ad sits above all nine in the same precedence chain — an ad page tagged with a layout tag too renders as an ad.)

Feature package

#home-feature-package

Cinematic hero with gradient text overlay on a large feature image (desktop) + a supporting stack on the right (post 2 as a horizontal card, posts 3–5 as a numbered list with thumbnails). Up to 5 posts. Only posts that have a feature image are eligible — posts without an image are filtered out.

Use for: the lead investigation, a special package, the morning's biggest story.

Feature rail

#home-feature-rail

A sibling of the feature package: the same cinematic hero with gradient text overlay on the left, but the right column is a uniform vertical stack of four image-right story cards (posts 2–5) rather than one large card plus a numbered list. Up to 5 posts. Like the feature package, only posts that have a feature image are eligible.

Use for: a flagship desk where the lead deserves a hero but the supporting stories should read as equals rather than a ranked countdown.

Briefing

#home-briefing

Image-less morning bulletin / digest. Up to 9 posts in a responsive 1 / 2 / 3 column grid; each item is a compact card with a small thumbnail (or section eyebrow when there's no image).

Use for: roundups, daily briefings, "what you missed overnight", market openings.

Briefing carousel

#home-briefing-carousel

Thumb-row briefing cards in a horizontal scroll-snap track — three cards visible on desktop, slide for more. Up to 27 posts. Same morning-briefing voice as #home-briefing, but trades the static stack for a carousel when you want to surface a deeper queue.

Use for: longer briefings, "the morning queue", any section where you have more entries than a static stack can hold without growing the homepage too long.

Asymmetric lead + list

#home-asymmetric-lead-list

Lead post + secondary list. Left column: a hero with feature image (post 1) followed by two sub-cards (posts 2–3) underneath. Right column: a compact thumb-row list (posts 4–12, up to nine items, hairline-separated). The classic Markets / Politics layout — one lead, the rest as headlines.

Use for: a vertical desk (Markets, Politics, Sports) where one story leads and the rest are headlines.

Opinion hedcut

#home-opinion-hedcut

Columnist cards in a 1 / 2 / 3 column grid (up to 6 columnists), each card showing the author's profile image (or a hedcut placeholder if no image), the column title in italic display serif, and the byline. Designed for opinion sections where the byline is the brand.

Use for: the Opinion / Editorial / Commentary desk where the byline is the brand.

Tag columns

#home-tag-columns

N parallel columns — one column per public tag attached to the recipe page itself, in editor-set order. Each column shows that tag's five newest posts: a lead with feature image at the top, then four hairline-separated headlines below. Up to four columns visible on XL screens.

This is the only layout that does not use the page's primary tag to pull posts. Instead, every public tag you add to the recipe page becomes its own column, and the column header links to that tag's archive. The page's custom excerpt renders as a small eyebrow above the columns; if you leave it blank, the eyebrow is omitted.

Use for: a section row that mirrors a navigation list — "Education / Lifestyle / Health" side by side, each column a live feed of its newest stories. The recipe page itself is just a tag carrier; tag order matches the column order.

Standard 3-column grid

#home-standard-3-column-grid

A horizontal scroll-snap carousel of image-top cards — three cards visible on desktop, slide for more, up to 9 posts. Same arrow controls as the Editor's Picks strip and the briefing carousel. Despite the name, it isn't a static three-up grid — it's a paginated carousel that surfaces three cards at a time. For a denser four-across version on wide screens, see #home-standard-4-column-grid below.

Use for: general news, features, anything that doesn't fit a more specialized layout.

Standard 4-column grid

#home-standard-4-column-grid

A wider sibling of #home-standard-3-column-grid: the same horizontal scroll-snap carousel of image-top cards, but four cards visible on desktop instead of three (three on tablet, one-with-peek on mobile). Up to 9 posts, same arrow controls. Reach for it when a desk has a deep queue you want to read denser on large screens.

Use for: high-volume desks (Tech, Culture, Sports) where four across reads better on a wide screen than three.

The ad row: #home-ad

#home-ad

Not a story layout, but it lives in the same recipe-page system — and it sits first in the precedence chain, above all nine layouts. A page tagged #home-ad becomes an in-feed advertisement row between homepage sections: the page's body (an image banner or ad-network code) renders inside a labelled ad frame instead of a posts query. No primary tag is needed, and you can create several #home-ad pages and order them by publish date like any other row. The whole row is removed for paying members, divider and all.

The creative workflow — image banners, desktop + mobile pairs, AdSense code, and the Enable ads master switch it depends on — is covered in Ads.

Opening a recipe page directly

Every published Ghost page has its own URL, and recipe pages are no exception — a reader following an old link, or a search engine crawler, can land on /your-recipe-page-slug/ directly. Because the body of a recipe page is empty, that URL used to render as a blank shell.

Meridian fixes the reader experience automatically: open a recipe page at its own URL and it renders the exact same section row it contributes to the homepage — the curated headlines, in the right layout — plus a breadcrumb and a "Back to the front page" link. The URL is a real, useful page, not an empty one.

Keeping recipe pages out of search results

By default these pages are indexable like any other. If you'd rather search engines didn't list them — they're layout config, and the homepage and tag archives are the surfaces you actually want ranked — add a noindex tag to each recipe page individually:

<meta name="robots" content="noindex, follow">

noindex, follow keeps that one page out of the index while still letting crawlers follow its links to the underlying posts. Repeat this for each recipe page you want excluded.