Features

Membership & the paywall

This is the section worth reading in full, even if you've built Ghost themes before — the paywall moment is the entire reason Fold exists, not a bolted-on feature. Everything here is built on Ghost's native Members and Portal system; Fold doesn't add its own payment or subscription logic, only the design around it.

How the fold works

When a visitor without access opens a gated post, Fold renders whatever free content Ghost allows through, then — instead of just stopping — breaks the page with a torn, zigzag edge and drops into a full-width, solid signal-red section: a rotated MEMBERS ONLY stamp, a headline, your Paywall text, and a single Subscribe button. Non-members who already have a free account also get a "Sign in" link underneath. Members with access to that post never see any of this — the template checks Ghost's own access flag per post, so the fold only ever appears to the people it's actually meant for.

Turning on Members and Tiers

None of this appears until two things are true on your site:

Members is enabled — Settings → Membership → Enable Ghost membership subscriptions.
At least one paid Tier exists — created from the same Membership settings screen. Without a paid tier, you can still mark posts "Members-only," but there's no paid option to actually gate toward.

Required

Skip either of these and the header's Sign in / Subscribe buttons won't render at all — Fold only shows them when members_enabled is true on your site, so an inactive Members setup looks like the theme is missing a feature rather than a setting waiting to be turned on.

Gating a post

Open any post in the editor and use the Access control in the right-hand settings panel to change it from Public to one of:

Members-only — visible to any signed-in member, free or paid.
Paid-members-only — visible only to paying members.
A specific Tier — if you run more than one paid tier and want to gate content to just one of them.

Publish (or update) the post, and it's gated immediately for anyone without the right access level.

Public preview: showing part of a gated post for free

Once a post's Access is set above Public, Ghost's editor exposes a Public preview divider you can drop into the content — everything above that divider is served to every visitor, gated or not; everything below it is stripped out of the post's HTML entirely for anyone without access. That's the actual free/paid split; Fold's paywall section is what fills the gap Ghost leaves behind for the stripped portion.

If you don't add a Public preview divider, Ghost falls back to serving no body content at all to non-members — just the title, excerpt, and feature image — with the fold appearing directly under the header.

The paywall component itself

What renders inside .fold-paywall, top to bottom:

A torn/perforated top edge (pure CSS, no image) marking the actual cut between free and paid.
The rotated MEMBERS ONLY stamp.
A fixed headline: "This post is for subscribers."
Your Paywall text setting, if you've set one.
One button — Subscribe — which opens Ghost's Portal signup flow. No second call to action competes with it.
For visitors who already have a free account: a "Sign in" link, so people who forgot they'd already registered aren't pushed toward creating a duplicate signup.

Posts left at Public access don't get a paywall — but non-members still see a footer subscribe band at the bottom, headed by your Email signup text setting and a Subscribe button. It only shows when Members is enabled and the visitor isn't already signed in, so it never nags an existing subscriber.

Lock badges in the feed

In the homepage's dispatch-index feed, any post the current visitor can't fully access shows a small red-bordered "Members only" badge on its row — automatic, driven by the same per-post access flag as the paywall itself. There's nothing to configure here; it's a signal, not a setting.

Portal: sign in, subscribe, account

Every Subscribe, Sign in, and Account link in Fold (header, paywall, footer CTA) is a standard Ghost Portal trigger — data-portal="signup", data-portal="signin", data-portal="account". Portal itself — its look, the tiers it offers, its copy — is configured from Settings → Membership → Portal settings in Ghost Admin, not from anything in Fold. The theme only decides when and where those buttons appear.