Ghost cover art desk: generate and set every post image

Build me a cover art desk for our Ghost publication. My editor opens this app before every send to make sure nothing goes out without a good cover image. It has two main views, Cover Desk and Cover Library, plus a settings panel that holds our house style.

Cover Desk is the landing view. A handler loads every post using Ghost Browse Posts (Admin API), paginating through all pages (Ghost caps limit at 100, so follow meta.pagination.next until it is null) so drafts, scheduled and published posts all come back. Group the results into three sections: Scheduled, Draft, Published. Order them so whatever goes out next sits at the very top: scheduled posts first, sorted by published_at ascending so the soonest send leads, then drafts sorted by updated_at descending, then published posts sorted by published_at descending. Each row shows a small thumbnail of the current feature image, the post title, its status, and the relevant date. Any post with no feature_image gets a loud, high-contrast No cover badge, and each section header shows a count of how many posts in that group are missing one. Put a global gap count at the top of the page so the editor sees the number the second the app opens.

Selecting a post opens a detail pane. On the left, show the post title and its excerpt, along with status, publish date and current cover if there is one. On the right, generate three cover directions using Generate an Image at a 16:9 aspect ratio, all three in one go. Each direction should take a visibly different angle (for example one abstract or graphic, one typographic, one photographic or illustrative), and each prompt should combine the saved house style with the post title and excerpt so the images actually relate to the piece. Show the three as large side-by-side previews with a Regenerate control on each one and a free-text box where the editor can add a tweak like "warmer palette" or "no people" and re-run just that direction. Also offer an optional 1:1 variant of the chosen direction for social sharing, since Ghost feature images are landscape but social cards are square.

Approving a direction runs the write sequence, and there are two rules here that matter more than anything else in the app. First, upload the chosen image to Ghost with Upload Image (Admin API) and keep the returned image URL. Second, and this is the critical part, immediately before writing, re-read the post with Read Post (Admin API) to fetch its current updated_at value. Ghost's Update Post (Admin API) uses optimistic locking and requires the post's current updated_at, so a value cached from the earlier list load will be stale and the write will fail or, worse, clobber someone else's edit. The handler must be a strict re-read then write sequence every single time, never a write from list data, and the handler description should say so explicitly. Then call Update Post (Admin API) with the uploaded image URL as feature_image, an alt text as feature_image_alt, and the freshly read updated_at. If Ghost returns a conflict, re-read once and retry, and if it fails again surface a plain message telling the editor the post changed underneath them.

The second rule: the update payload must never include the newsletter option. Ghost sends a post by email to the whole list when newsletter is passed on publish, and an editor fixing a cover image must never be able to email subscribers by accident. Do not add it as a toggle, do not include it conditionally, just leave it out of every update this app makes. Note this constraint in the handler description too so nobody adds it later.

Cover Library is the second view. It shows every existing feature image across the whole archive as a dense grid of large tiles, newest first, with the post title and publish date under each. The point is to see style drift at a glance, so give the editor a contact-sheet mode with the captions hidden and tiles packed tight, and let them group by year or by month so eras of the site are visually adjacent. Let an editor mark any tile as Needs restyle, persist that mark, and surface the marked posts as a queue on the Cover Desk so they can be reworked through the same three-directions flow. Show a count of published posts that have no cover at all in this view too.

Put a Backfill the archive button on the Cover Desk. It starts a background agent that works through the whole gap list without the editor babysitting it. The agent browses published posts with no feature image using Browse Posts (Admin API), paginating through everything, and then for each post: generates one cover at 16:9 from the saved house style plus that post's title and excerpt using Generate an Image, uploads it with Upload Image (Admin API), re-reads the post with Read Post (Admin API) to get its current updated_at, and sets feature_image and feature_image_alt with Update Post (Admin API), again never passing newsletter. It should pace itself to stay inside Ghost's rate limits, and if several posts in a row fail it should stop and report rather than grind through errors.

The agent writes a run log back into the app so the results are visible in the UI, not buried somewhere. Add a Backfill runs panel that lists each run with its start time, status, how many posts were processed, and a per-post line saying what happened (cover set, skipped, failed and why, plus the resulting image). While a run is in progress the panel should show live progress and the post currently being worked on, and the Cover Desk gap counts should reflect the new state once the run finishes.

Add a share action for sign-off. On any proposed cover, Share to Slack uploads the image to the chosen channel with Slack Upload a File, then posts a message with Send a Message giving the post title, its scheduled or published date, whether it currently has a cover, and a short note that this is a proposed cover awaiting sign-off. Use Get Permalink to grab a link to that message and store it against the post so the app row shows a Shared, awaiting sign-off state with a link straight to the Slack thread. Sharing must never write anything to Ghost. Approval always happens back in the app.

Persist a few things. The house style is a saved block of text describing our palette, mood, typography treatment and any hard rules like no stock-photo faces, editable in a settings panel, and every single generation in the app and in the backfill agent uses it. Also save the default Slack channel for sign-off, an alt-text convention, the Needs restyle marks, and the generated candidates per post so reopening a post shows what was already produced instead of burning a fresh generation. Design it for a single editor working through a queue: fast keyboard-friendly navigation between posts, big image previews, and the gap count always visible.