The story behind Flux
After trying lots of different Ghost themes for my personal blog, I gave up. They were either bad-looking or too expensive. And that's where Flux comes in. I decided to create my own theme, and what a journey it was. In the beginning, I had no idea what I was doing (I even set up Babel and Webpack for it 🫠). It was a nightmare.
I tried to apply my experience creating React applications to Ghost, but it didn't work out. So I started once again, this time with Gulp, and it was surprisingly a joy. I wrote all the CSS in the old-fashioned way (no Tailwind, no CSS Modules). I rediscovered a lot of things and learned a lot on this journey.
When I launched my blog with Flux (you can see it at joaopedro.dev), it was full of bugs, but over time, I managed to fix them and improve it along the way.
After using it for some time, I thought, "Why not sell it?" But I never had the time. Then in October, I lost my job at Hygraph, so I had some free time (definitely not the way I imagined 😂), and started packing it to sell.
What a journey once again! Creating a theme and selling it are two totally different things, but I figured things out. From setting up Stripe (the only way to receive money in Brazil), to creating a structure to send emails when the theme has an update, and much more.
Flux is a combination of several things. It's an opinionated theme, not that flexible, it's fast (I hate slow websites with lots of JavaScript), and most importantly: it was created to save you time, not spend hours and hours figuring things out as I had to.
I'm still improving it, creating the docs and a landing page. My plan for the future, if Flux goes well, is to sell more themes (and here comes Next Level Themes).
I hope you guys enjoy it (if you live in a country where the dollar is too expensive—like Brazil—just shoot me a DM on X and I'll happily provide you a discount). My main goal here is to help you thrive, that's why I'm constantly improving it, after all, it's my personal website that uses Flux, so it's in my interest to have a great theme/experience for it!
See you around,
João Pedro Schmitz