Staff Creator

What it does

Ghost adds staff one invitation at a time, each with an email address that has to be real and confirmed. Staff Creator builds the same accounts in bulk: you fill in a short form per person, it packs them into a Ghost import zip, and Ghost's own importer creates the users. The whole thing runs in your browser and never touches your Ghost site; nothing changes until you upload the zip yourself.

1. Add each staff member

Fill in the form for each person you want to import, then press Save (and optionally add another). That adds the person to the list and clears the form for the next one. The list, and the Export ZIP button with it, only appear once at least one person has been saved.

• Name and Email are required. The email auto-generates from the name (using @noreply.invalid), which is fine for a byline that will never log in; overwrite it with a real address if you want the person to be able to sign in to Ghost.
• Role determines Ghost permissions: Contributor, Author, Editor, or Administrator. Contributor staff members aren't limited on Ghost(Pro), and most sites use that role for bylines.
• Bio is capped at 250 characters, which is Ghost's limit.
• Photo is optional. It goes into the zip and becomes the profile image.
• Page Content is optional rich text. If you provide it, a published staff profile page is created, tagged #staff-profile, with this person as its author. Your theme decides whether such pages look like anything; if it has no staff-page layout, leave this blank. (If you run Advanced Search with Index authors on, the page's body is folded into the author's search record, so a search for something in the bio finds the person; see the Search docs.)
• Social Media: X, Facebook, Threads, TikTok, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Bluesky, YouTube and Instagram, entered as handles the way the placeholders show them (@cathy, or @[email protected] for Mastodon). They land on the Ghost profile fields of the same names.

Every saved person appears in the Staff Members list below the form, where you can remove them again before exporting.

2. Get the zip

Once everyone is in the list, press Export ZIP. Your browser downloads ghost-staff-import.zip, which contains:

• ghost-staff-import.json, the users in Ghost's import format, plus the profile pages and the #staff-profile tag when any member has page content;
• images/builder-uploads/, any photos you added, at the paths the JSON refers to.

The list stays on the page after exporting, so you can add a late arrival and export again; the new zip contains everyone.

3. Upload it to Ghost

1. In Ghost admin, open Settings, then Import/Export, and use the Universal importer.
2. Upload ghost-staff-import.zip. Ghost creates the users, the profile pages and the tag, and reports what it imported.
3. The new accounts appear under Settings → Staff straight away, with their role, bio, photo and social links filled in.

Staff members are created without passwords. If you gave someone a real email address, they use Ghost's Forgot password link on the sign-in page to set one and get in. If you're only creating bylines, none of that is necessary; a @noreply.invalid address never receives mail and can't be used to sign in.