Cartanza Initial Setup Steps

Initial Settings

Once you've signed up for Cartanza, the next thing you'll want to do is setup your mailgun settings, OpenAI settings, and Stripe connect settings. Most of the Ghost blogging functionality is the same as in regular Ghost which you can find lots of information about on the Ghost.org site. Keep in mind that Ghost.org doesn't have the AI and e-commerce capabilities that Cartanza has.

Mail

At the bottom left navigation, click on the gear icon to go into settings and search for the word "mail". Here you'll see both Mailgun and SMTP settings that require setup. There are two types of mail integrations. SMTP is for transactional emails that go to one person at a time. For example sign in emails. Mailgun is required for bulk email delivery for your newsletters. Mailgun is the only supported provider for bulk email delivery. You can use other providers for transactional emails using SMTP if you prefer (gmail for example). You can find more information about Ghost email requirements here:
Why do I have to signup for mailgun?

There's a great youtube video that describes how to find you Mailgun API keys and SMTP credentials below. Just follow the steps on the mailgun site of this video. You can ignore the rest of the steps as you just need to enter those values in the Mailgun and SMTP settings in the admin site. You can get a free account from Mailgun for up to 100 emails daily.

OpenAI

If you want to use the AI content and image generation capabilities for editing blog posts, then you'll need to enter your OpenAI keys and model preferences in the settings area.

1. Click on settings (the gear icon) at the bottom left in the admin menu. Search for OpenAI.
2. Enter your OpenAI API Key you can get your key here
3. Choose your text generation model for blog content. Enter gpt-4o-mini for good results at a reasonable cost and speed.
4. Choose your image generation model for generating images. Enter dall-e-3 here to get resonable quality images. You can use dall-e-2 for testing a significantly lower rates.

The video below shows how to get your API key and add credits to your account.

Stripe

Click on settings (the gear icon) at the bottom left in the admin menu. Search for Stripe or tiers. Click on the "Connect with Stripe" button and follow the process. If you don't already have a Stripe account, you'll be guided to create one.