Glossary

Short definitions of the recurring terms in these docs. Each entry is linkable, so other pages point here the first time a term appears.

Breaking ticker

The slim bar at the very top of every page — a pulsing dot, a Breaking label, and a scrolling marquee of your latest headlines. It's fed by posts tagged #breaking and controlled by the Enable breaking ticker setting; with no tagged posts it hides itself. See Breaking news.

Code injection

Ghost's built-in box for adding small code snippets to your site (Settings → Code injection) without editing theme files. Snippets survive theme updates. Meridian publishes stable selectors specifically for this — see Code injections.

Consent mode

Google's Consent Mode v2 — a signal that tells Google's ad scripts whether a visitor has consented to advertising cookies. Meridian's Ad consent mode setting emits a deny-by-default baseline for EEA/UK/Swiss visitors before any ad script runs. See Ads → Privacy & compliance.

Custom template

An alternative page layout bundled with the theme, chosen per page in the editor's Page settings → Template dropdown. Meridian ships two: Sections (the all-sections overview page) and Bookmarks (the saved-articles page).

data-* hooks

Stable data-region / data-component / data-variant / data-part attributes Meridian stamps on its markup so your code-injection CSS has something dependable to target — they don't change between releases the way styling classes can. The full vocabulary lives in Code injections.

Internal tag

A Ghost tag whose name starts with # (e.g. #breaking, #video, #home-briefing). Internal tags never appear on public tag pages — they exist to trigger theme behaviour. Meridian's whole internal-tag vocabulary is catalogued in Editorial conventions.

Persistent player (mini player)

Meridian's video continuity feature: once a reader starts a video, it keeps playing in a small corner mini player as they move between pages, instead of stopping at every navigation. Controlled by Enable persistent player and Mini player position. See Persistent video player.

Presence-gated page

A Ghost page whose existence is the on/off switch for a theme feature — publish it and the feature appears; draft or delete it and the feature hides, with no theme setting involved. Meridian uses this pattern for the Membership CTA (membership-cta), Editor's note (editors-note), archive intro (archive-intro), newsletter CTA (newsletter-cta), preferred-source card (preferred-source), and the ad slots (ad-*).

Primary tag

The first tag in a post's or page's tag list. When content has several tags, Ghost treats the first one as primary. In Meridian it drives the section eyebrow on cards and heroes — and on a recipe page it selects which posts fill the homepage row. Reorder tags in the settings panel to change it.

Recipe page

A Ghost page that composes one homepage section row: its #home-* internal tag picks the layout, its primary public tag picks the posts, and its publish date sets the row order. The page body stays empty (except for #home-tag-columns' excerpt and #home-ad's creative). See Homepage sections.

Slug

The URL-friendly version of a name — the last part of a web address. A page called "Editor's Note" typically has the slug editors-note. Meridian reserves several slugs to wire pages to features (archive-intro, bookmarks, editors-note, membership-cta, newsletter-cta, preferred-source, and the ad-* slots); set a page's slug in Page settings → Page URL, and it must match exactly.