This site is the demo for Pod, an open-source Ghost theme for podcasters. It exists to show what the theme looks like with real audio, real chapters, a valid iTunes-spec RSS feed, and a working /subscribe/ landing page — instead of the usual Lorem Ipsum.
Who's behind it
Pod is built by Magic Pages, a managed hosting service for Ghost. As of the release of this theme in July 2026, Magic Pages hosts around 1,400 sites for independent creators. Pod is one of the themes that came out of that work.
Open source, MIT-licensed
Pod is released under the MIT license. Fork it, ship it on your own site, submit a PR, cut a customer theme from it — all fine. The bundled fonts (Inter, Source Serif Pro, JetBrains Mono) ship under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. Everything else is MIT.
The repo will live on GitHub at magicpages/pod once v1.0 is tagged. Until then, the theme is being built in the open in Magic Pages' theme-development workspace.
About the “episodes” on this demo
The six episodes on this site are not a real podcast. They're a way to make the theme feel lived-in rather than empty.
The audio comes from LibriVox — a volunteer project that records public-domain books and speeches. Everything you can play here is a genuine LibriVox reading of a genuine 18th- or 19th-century text on free expression, self-government, or the design of institutions:
- Douglass — Frederick Douglass's 1876 Oration at the Freedmen's Monument in Washington.
- Machiavelli — Chapter 3 of The Prince (1513).
- Hamilton — Federalist No. 83 (1788).
- Brutus — Anti-Federalist No. 5 (1787).
- Thoreau — Part 1 of Civil Disobedience (1849).
- Mill — Chapter 1 of On Liberty (1859).
The show notes, chapter timestamps, cover art and framing are freshly written for the demo. The audio isn't. Anything you'd do with your own show — real transcripts, real guest info, real funding links — the theme already supports; the demo just doesn't have real content to hang there.
What the theme actually does
Pod is a full-feature podcast theme for Ghost 6.x:
- Editorial home page with a hero episode, an archive grid, and a subscribe band pulling in the right platform buttons for your feed.
- A custom audio player — skip ±30s, playback speed toggle, waveform scrubber, keyboard-accessible seek.
- iTunes-spec RSS at /podcast/rss/ — passes Apple's validator with a 93/100 score out of the box, no server config required.
- Podcasting 2.0 support —
<podcast:guid>,<podcast:locked>,<podcast:funding>,<podcast:value>, chapters, transcripts, per-episode people, fediverse comment threads. - A /subscribe/ landing page that meets listeners in whichever app they already use — 16 podcast apps supported, deep-linked where possible.
- Localised in English, German, French, Spanish, Ukrainian, and Italian.
Read the README on GitHub for the full feature list and setup guide.