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Ghost has always been an excellent blog platform but since the <a href="/ghost-3-0-brings-subscriptions-memberships-and-more/">release of Ghost 3.0</a>, the development team has been slamming out the features on a regular basis to make it even better.
This latest feature is the ability to send native email newsletters with Ghost using their new Members &amp; Subscriptions feature (which you can read more about <a href="https://ghost.org/members/">here</a>).
The way this works is simple; when you write a new post, you can now choose to deliver the post to subscribers via email as shown below.
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/image.png" alt="Ghost 3.0 Native Newsletters" /></figure>
This isn't just a quick email notification, however, you can even set a custom subject line, preview the email before it goes out and send yourself a test one to make sure everything looks OK.
The dev team have included a stunning new email template that does a great job of making the content look beautiful. If you use the members function within Ghost to offer paid subscriptions, then content specifically marked as paid only will only go to that subset of users and the same goes for free content of course. 
<figure class="kg-card kg-image-card kg-card-hascaption"><img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/image-1.png" alt="Ghost Email Template" /><figcaption>Here's a look at the email template.</figcaption></figure>
There is an unsubscribe link within each email and users can, of course, choose whether or not to subscribe from within their profile on your website.
There's more information about this feature over on the Ghost blog where they first shared the news so <a href="https://ghost.org/blog/native-email/">go check it out</a>.

You Can Now Send Email Newsletters Natively With Ghost

cms-critic-staff

You might have heard of Ghost — an open-source blogging platform that launched in 2013. Ghost was founded by John O’Nolan, a former WordPress employee who grew frustrated with the complexities of the traditional blogging platform and decided to do something about it.
Today, more than a million people and businesses use Ghost, including Apple, Tinder, and Mozilla. This number is likely to increase now that the company has rolled out Ghost 3.0 — its biggest release since the first version of Ghost. Here is a comprehensive look at Ghost’s latest update, Ghost 3.0.
<h2>New and Improved Features</h2>
The core idea behind this latest release is to help publishers build and maintain engaged audiences. The new and exciting features introduced as part of Ghost 3.0 reflect this thinking.
<h3>Members &amp; Subscriptions</h3>
The most significant feature introduced by Ghost 3.0 is support for memberships and subscriptions. The feature is still in beta but is fully functioning.
A simple member signup system turns anonymous visitors into registered members, helping you grow a community of like-minded individuals. Ghost 3.0 allows you to set three different access levels:
<ul>
<li>Public content</li>
<li>Members-only content</li>
<li>Paid members-only content.</li>
</ul>
This is what a post with members-only access looks like on Nolan’s own blog:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screenshot1-1_josxry.png" alt="Ghost 3.0 - 1" />
You can have a combination of all three access levels, as long as your theme supports it. If you already have an audience elsewhere, you can give it access to your new site via Ghost’s imports and integrations function.
Ghost 3.0 has a Stripe integration, so taking payments for premium-membership benefits is effortless. Members can pay for your content via credit card or Apple Pay. You can create your own pricing structure. For example, these are the pricing tiers that Nolan chose for his blog:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screenshot2-1_ka9xit.png" alt="Ghost 3.0 - 2" />
The billing features are integrated with Stripe Billing API, not Stripe Connect. That means that if Ghost the company were to fold, your site and billing would still work as usual.
<h3>Full-Featured Headless CMS</h3>
Ghost worked tirelessly on improving its APIs (application program interface, a set of protocols for building software applications) and Webhooks (HTTP callbacks that let you create or set up integrations). The company’s efforts have paid off — you can run Ghost 3.0 as a decoupled headless CMS.
<h3>Images</h3>
Working with images on Ghost 3.0 is much easier than before. When you insert an image into a post, it automatically resizes and optimizes it for your theme. This new feature saves you a ton of time and ensures that pages with a lot of images load faster.
You can also add an image gallery with up to nine images at a time. Ghost 3.0 automatically organizes the photos to look their best.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screenshot3-1_vkx3cg.png" alt="Ghost 3.0 Image Galleries" />
<h3>Drag and Drop Capabilities</h3>
Changing the layout of a post with Ghost 3.0 is a breeze. You can drag and drop any card, whether it’s text-based or image-based, within a post. The editor auto-scrolls as you move the cards up and down.
<h3>Bookmark Cards</h3>
Ghost 3.0 lets you add a bookmark card into your post, which simplifies the process of sharing links from sites with no automatic embeds.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screenshot4-1_xra7k5.png" alt="Ghost 3.0 - Cards" />
As long as you use a URL with the correct meta information, the bookmark card will show:
<ul>
<li>Page title</li>
<li>Preview image</li>
<li>Excerpt</li>
<li>Author</li>
<li>Publisher.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Admin Dashboard Updates</h3>
Ghost 3.0 also updated the admin dashboard. There’s a new site preview feature as well as an option to filter drafts and published posts depending on:
<ul>
<li>Author</li>
<li>Status</li>
<li>Date</li>
<li>Tag.</li>
</ul>
<h3>Themes</h3>
The default Ghost theme has been improved, with added support for dark mode. Also, Ghost added three open-source magazine-style themes and a new starter theme for developers to its marketplace.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/screenshot_5_ppuumt.png" alt="Ghost 3.0 - themes" />
<h3>WordPress Importer</h3>
Ghost 3.0 has a migration plugin for WordPress, which allows you to export posts, pages, tags, and images into a set of files. Importing these files into Ghost 3.0 is a quick and painless process.
Ghost 3.0 doesn’t have built-in comments, but it integrates with many popular comment platforms so that you can migrate your WordPress comments easily.
<h3>New Integrations</h3>
Ghost makes it easy to set up integrations with multiple apps and tools. New integrations include Ulysses, iA Writer, and <a href="https://write.as/" target="_blank">Write.as</a>, whereas <a href="https://zapier.com" target="_blank">Zapier</a> integration has seen an update.
<h3>That’s Not All!</h3>
On top of the features mentioned above, Ghost 3.0 comes with new developer documentation. The company also launched a weekly newsletter that focuses on important stories, ideas, and publishing resources. If you want to see the full list of updates, take a look at <a href="https://gist.github.com/allouis/aae9e45748da87a6928ac814a04413bb" target="_blank">Ghost 3.0 changelog</a>.

Ghost 3.0 Brings Subscriptions, Memberships and More

laura-martisiute

I've always loved the concept of Ghost. It's the (relatively) new kid on the block compared to WordPress and having competition is healthy. Recently, I ran CMS Critic on Ghost for a brief period using their paid Ghost Pro option, here's my Ghost Pro review and why I moved back to WordPress.For those unfamiliar with Ghost Pro, it's basically an offering from the makers of the Ghost blogging platform that is fully hosted and managed by their support teams. <a href="https://ghost.org/pricing/">Pricing</a> ranges from around $29 to $199 per month (when billed annually).The initial appeal of trying something different led me to run this site on Ghost Pro for a period of about 4 months (January until May 1 this year) as a trial. During that time, I came across a number of positives and a number of negatives. Sadly, the negatives outweighed everything else so I ended up moving back to WordPress (which the site is now running on again as of this article).<h2>Positives</h2><ol><li>The editor is simple and easy to use and makes Gutenberg look like it was developed by monkeys (and not smart ones).</li><li>The speed at which you can navigate the dashboard, publish a post and perform tasks is significantly better than WordPress.</li><li>The fact that I didn't have to rely on any plugins for SEO unlike WordPress which pretty much makes Yoast or something similar mandatory (and you can argue with me on that if you like but you'll still be wrong as far as I'm concerned).</li></ol><h2>Negatives</h2><ol><li>Ghost does not have a media library therefore every time you write a post, you need to re-upload any images for it. This means that if you write quite a bit about WordPress and typically use the logo for your featured image, for example, you'll be uploading that logo every time for each post. This is just silly and poor management of images and disk space.</li><li>NO ftp or SSH access. I can somewhat understand the no SSH part but for the hundred dollar a month range, not being able to use FTP and grab files or upload files to my server simply makes me mad. I don't want to have to email (and wait for) their support every time I need to do this.</li><li>Support is slow. If you are on the middle plan ($99 monthly if you don't take an annual plan) you only get support Monday to Friday so if your site goes down (on a HOSTED AND MANAGED PLAN mind you) you will be out of luck until Monday. Someone tell me I'm crazy for thinking this is ridiculous. Furthermore, their support is just slow.Here's a scenario to help you understand:  I emailed Ghost Support on a Saturday asking for an image export so I could move back to WordPress. I received a reply at 6:30 Monday morning asking me to do a security verification (no prob, did that and replied back literally 1 minute later).  I didn't get a reply back from them again until almost noon. That's 5 hours. The export I wanted was 3 gigs and doesn't take 5 hours to prepare. Sorry but for “premium” support, that's too slow for this guy.</li><li>They can't do much of anything. This may sound like I'm just being an ass but seriously, I use push notifications and since there's no plugin for Ghost, I needed to install some javascript and then upload a service-worker.js file to the root of my website. This is the only way to get it to work properly with my push notification provider.Here's the response I received from Ghost Support: “Thanks for reaching out! We're not able to load files into the root directory of your site.“I was then told I could add it to my theme and upload it which would then make it accessible at the root of my website, so I asked if they could do that for me. The answer was no.Hm, so what can they do for me then for $99 month?</li></ol> Now let's discuss why I feel so entitled as to think that they SHOULD be able to do these things for me. It's simple. I'm with <a href="https://www.bigscoots.com/portal/?affid=1002">BigScoots</a> as my hosting provider of choice when running WordPress and I don't think there's anything I've ever asked them within reason that they've ever said no to. In fact, I'm pretty sure they've done things for me that I totally didn't even expect so why should it be a different experience with Ghost Pro. In short, it shouldn't.<h2>Conclusion</h2>Ghost itself is a solid blogging platform with some great features and an excellent editor but when combined with the hosted offering, Ghost Pro, there are too many shortcomings to make it something worth investing in.

Ghost Pro Review

mike-johnston

<a href="https://ghost.org/" target="_blank">Ghost</a> users can now preview their posts within their chosen theme before publication.
The free and cloud-hosted blogging solution was crowned winner of the <a href="/2014-most-promising-cms/" target="_blank">2014 Critics' Choice Award for Most Promising CMS</a>.
As one of the most exciting blogging platforms on the market, Ghost already does a lot of things right. But post previewing was certainly a missing feature, and will no doubt be welcomed by Ghost users.
<h2>See It &amp; Share It</h2>
Now, Ghost users can open the post settings menu and hit the post preview link to see exactly what the post is going to look like before it goes live. Users will see the post in the context of their active theme — exactly as any visitor would see it.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/preview-ui.jpg" />
Interestingly, users can also send a preview link to others for proof-reading or feedback purposes.
Ghost Pro users already have access to this new feature. Self-hosted Ghost users will need to upgrade to <a href="https://ghost.org/download/">Ghost 0.6.3</a> in order to benefit.
You can see the <a href="http://blog.ghost.org/post-previews/" target="_blank">official announcement right here</a>.
Otherwise, be sure to explore more of <a href="/products/ghost/" target="_blank">Ghost via our CMS Directory</a>.

Ghost Introduces Post Previews

<a href="https://ghost.org/" target="_blank">Ghost</a> isn't exactly brand new anymore, but it's definitely still an exciting project.
The free and cloud-hosted blogging platform is attracting bloggers from far and wide with its snazzy interface and welcoming attitude. The platform was even crowned as the <a href="/2014-most-promising-cms/" target="_blank">2014 Critics' Choice Award Winner for Most Promising CMS</a>.
However, as feature-rich as Ghost is, there's always been something quite fundamental missing from its otherwise awesome content editor. A spull chack. I mean spell check.
<h2>General Tweaks &amp; Built-in Spell Check</h2>
Ghost have introduced mobile image uploads, more responsive scrolling and a fix to stop the cursor getting lost when navigating with keyboard arrows.
Oh, and Ghost's built-in spell check function now finally works.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/editor-upgrade.png" />
This update seems subtle, but Ghost insist that it took a massive under-the-hood overhaul to achieve. In the end though, the general Ghost use-base won't notice much of a difference.
Ghost's founder John O'Nolan summed it up by  saying, “[It's] basically the same editor that you’re used to writing with, it just sucks a lot less.”
Find out more about <a href="http://blog.ghost.org/ghost-spellcheck/" target="_blank">Ghost's slyly improved eidtor</a>.
<h2>Lifting The Lid on Two Years of Spending</h2>
April 29th 2013 was when Ghost went live on Kickstarter, eventually raking in $300,000 worth of funding.
In line with Ghost's extremely open and friendly attitude towards all that use and consider it, the team behind the platform have decided to expose their entire two year's worth of spending — in detail.
You can see <a href="http://blog.ghost.org/year-2/" target="_blank">where all the pennies went right here</a>.
Otherwise, be sure to explore more of <a href="/products/ghost/" target="_blank">Ghost via our CMS Directory</a>.

Ghost Upgrades Content Editor & Reveals Spending Details

Regular reader will have noticed our DNN Software coverage this week, as part of CMS Critic's first round of Featured Weeks.
But the world of CMS whirled on in the background, and so it's only right that we bring you the highlights from this past week.
<h2>Ghost's Transparency</h2>
This week, Ghost delivered on it promise to be more “transparent” (yes, I know, the irony) by revealing their revenue in full.
The blogging platform has also released a “Revenue Dashboard”, inspired by a similar feature offered by Buffer last year.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/baremetrics1.png" />
Ghost's annual revenue so far is $411k, and the revenue dashboard offers up a whole host of other revenue-related metrics.
<a href="http://blog.ghost.org/april-2015-update/" target="_blank">Read more here</a>.
<h2>US Shopify Users Get Google Wallet</h2>
Shopify, one of the world's leading eCommerce solutions, recently announced the arrival of Google Wallet for its US user base.
The introduction of Google Wallet is another effort from Shopify to simplify their mobile checkout process.
Shoppers who have their Google Wallet already set up will be able to simply click “Buy with Google”, instead of typing in their credit card details, billing, and shipping address on a tiny virtual keyboard.
<a href="https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/payments/accelerated-checkouts/google-pay" target="_blank">Read more here</a>.
<h2>WordPress 4.2 On The Horizon</h2>
For those of you who don't know, WordPress is the most widely used CMS (and yes, it is a CMS) in the world.
Thus, the arrival of its latest version, WordPress 4.2, is being eagerly awaited.
The fourth beta was recently released, meaning that the final release of version 4.2 shouldn't be too far away at all. In fact, it could be a matter of days rather than weeks.
<a href="https://wordpress.org/news/2015/04/wordpress-4-2-beta-4/" target="_blank">Read more here</a>.

Weekly News Roundup: Ghost Revenue, Shopify's Google Wallet & WordPress 4.2

Hotjar - Spot what confuses

Spot what confuses your users with Hotjar & AI

#ffffff

<a href="https://ghost.org/" target="_blank"> Ghost</a>, the newest and most exciting blogging platform, has just released version 0.5.
Launched in late 2013, Ghost has taken the blogging world by storm, offering users a hosted and self-hosted option with a remarkably straightforward, yet progressive user interface. In fact, questions have even been raised in relation to <a href="/wordpress-vs-ghost/" target="_blank"> WordPress vs Ghost</a>. But that's a discussion for another day.
In any case, this new Ghost release, Codenamed MSR1, brings about a huge host of changes. Labelled as, “a massive technical progression”, Ghost 0.5 represents a total of 616 commits across 471 issues from 61 contributors across the globe. Let's take a look at the highlights.
<h2>Tweaks and Changes, Big and Small</h2>
First up, Ghost now has multi-user support. 
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/05-3-1700x0.jpg" alt="Ghost 0.5" />
This means that multiple Authors, Editors, and Administrators can work together on the same blog, making life a lot easier for companies, communities and all kinds of collaborative projects.
Furthermore, Ghost has become the first and only open-source publishing platform to build a public JSON API. What does this mean? Well, Just like Twitter and Pinterest have an API which developers can build apps on top of, Ghost now has the same power. Now, iOS, Android, Desktop and even Web Apps can all be built on top of any Ghost blog.
The Ghost default theme has also enjoyed massive update with beautiful new user profile pages, full-bleed homepage cover images, restructured navigation, improved mobile styles, and a massive improvement to typography.
Also, thanks to a Ember.js conversion and a re-writing of the admin area, the Ghost team is now able to start building user-interface components which look and feel like what you might expect from a desktop (or mobile) operating system.
Here's some more of what Ghost 0.5 brings to the table:
<ul>
<li> Privacy.md  – Ghost has a new Open Source initiative called <a href="https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/blob/master/PRIVACY.md">Privacy.md</a>. They now ship a text file with a plain English description of every feature within the software which might affect user Privacy.</li>
<li> New Install Screen  – A refined UI when installing a new Ghost blog.</li>
<li> OAuth Support  – for extensible, secure authentication with less hassle.</li>
<li> Theme API improvements  – New helpers, functionality, and tools for theme developers.  <a href="http://dev.ghost.org/themes-multi-user-ready/"> 
</a></li>
<li> Auto-GZip  – Theme assets are now automatically GZipped in production environments. This makes Ghost blogs load faster.</li>
<li> Improved Keyboard Shortcuts  – New navigational shortcuts and international (non-English) keyboard support.</li>
<li> Mobile Improvements  – Better support on touch based devices.</li>
<li> HTML Emails  – All system emails now sent in a beautiful HTML email template (with plaintext fallback).</li>
</ul>
And that's not all, either. For a full list of changes, check out the <a href="https://gist.github.com/ErisDS/b7aa1a6e954f415cbb5b" target="_blank"> Ghost 0.5 changelog </a> .
<h2>New, Faster Release Cycle Announced</h2>
Ghost has that, “Screw it, I'll do it my way” swagger to it, and this bit of side-news is a prime example of it.
Instead of following the normal route of releasing 2-3 major updates a year, Ghost have decided to do things differently.
From here on out, Ghost users can expect to see new features, improvements and bug-fixes every 2-3 weeks. Not only is that different, but it's also majorly impressive.
Ghost Pro users will get these updates automatically, without needing to lift a finger. However, users running Ghost on their own server might feel tentative about this announcement. Although they can update whenever they like, new updating each month to gain the latest features might get a little time consuming.
Personally, I'm looking forward to seeing Ghost become more organic with it's new plan of constant self-improvement. It will certainly be interesting to see how well it works out, and f other follow suit.
For more information on Ghost 0.5, or to download it, check out the <a href="http://blog.ghost.org/ghost-0-5/" target="_blank">official announcement</a>.
To get started with your very own hosted or self-hosted Ghost blog, visit the <a href="https://ghost.org/" target="_blank"> Ghost website</a>.

Ghost 0.5 Released with Re-written Admin UI, Multi-user Support & More

Have you ever wanted to try the new, popular blogging platform Ghost? Today, you are in luck. If you don't want to test out their hosted version, you can download and set up Ghost quickly and easily on your own hosting solution.
I happen to use <a href="https://www.servint.net/">Servint</a> and today, I'm going to show you how to to set up Ghost on it in a few short, simple steps.
Servint offers the perfect environment to install <a href="http://ghost.org/">Ghost</a> (the new blogging platform) on.
I'm going to walk you through the process quickly and easily with a number of straightforward steps. Let's get started.
<ol>
<li>First, log into your WHM as root and navigate to Service Configuration &gt;&gt; Apache Configuration &gt;&gt; Reserved IPs Editor. From here, choose an IP address you wish to reserve for Ghost and click the checkmark in the Reserved box. This will release the IP address from Apache when you click save.</li>
<li>Once this is complete, you'll need to assign the IP address to the domain you wish to use. If you haven't set up your domain within WHM as of yet, you'll need to Create a New Account for the domain. You can do so at Account Functions » Create a New Account.</li>
<li>Once the account is created, it's time to assign the IP address you reserved to the domain you wish to use. To get started, go to Account Information » List Accounts. Find the domain in question and click on the + sign beside it. This will give you a number of buttons and options. Click on Change IP Address. You will be presented with a dropdown box of IP addresses, find the one that you reserved and select it. Click save. It may take upwards of 24 hours for the changes to propagate globally so if you cannot access the domain on that newly assigned IP address quite yet, don't worry, it will work soon. In the interim, you can access your ghost install via your IP address when we are done.</li>
<li>The next step will be to FTP into your account using the domain (or IP address you just assigned) and the credentials you specified when you created the new account in step 2. You'll want to have downloaded the Ghost source code from <a href="http://ghost.org/">http://ghost.org</a> and extracted the file. Now, connect using an FTP client and upload the contents of this folder into your www directory. Do not upload the ghost folder itself, just the contents (ie: folders and files within the zip).</li>
<li>Now it's time to SSH into your server and get things set up. If you do not have root access via SSH to your server, you can submit a request to ServInt via the support portal and they will activate it for you straight away. Do be careful, however, as root access to your server enabled can be dangerous if you do not have a strong password. In the hands of the wrong person, they can wipe all of your stuff and cause some serious damage. Once you have root access, ssh into your box using a program such as <a href="http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/%7Esgtatham/putty/">Putty</a> or something similar.</li>
<li>Now, we're going to install node and npm. Thankfully, ServInt uses CentOS and already has the right repository set up so that makes it easy. Run the command <code>yum install npm --enablerepo=epel</code>. This will begin the installation process. When complete, run <code>npm -v</code> and <code>node -v</code> and you should get back version numbers for each. If you do, you are ready for the next step.</li>
<li>From within your www (or public html) folder, run the command <code>npm install --production</code>. This will install Ghost and get it ready for your site.</li>
<li>Now, the first time you run Ghost it will copy the config.example.js file to config.js. Personally, I did this myself and then made the necessary modifications, so go ahead and run the command <code>cp config.example.js config.js</code>. Now you'll need to edit this file, so run <code>nano config.js</code>.</li>
<li>With the file open in the editor, change all instances of <code>http://my-ghost-blog.com</code> to your own domain. You will find it listed twice, once under Development and once under Production. Now change all instances of <code>127.0.0.1</code> to your IP address (the one you assigned to your domain) and all instances of <code>2368</code> to <code>80</code>. Now hit <code>ctrl-x</code> and <code>s</code> to save.</li>
<li>Now, in my instance, I didn't want to have to keep a ssh session open to run Ghost so I decided to do so using forever. Forever is an app that will monitor your node.js (Ghost) session and keep it running. If it stops for some reason it will restart it for you automatically. To install forever run these commands: <code>npm -g install forever</code>.</li>
<li>Once installed, you can start your new Ghost installation. The first time you start it, set the environment to production using this command: <code>NODE_ENV=production forever start index.js</code>. Once you've started it, you can leave the shell and access your new Ghost installation on either your domain or the IP address followed by /ghost in your browser. The first time you access Ghost, you'll need to set up a user. Once done, you'll be up and running. To stop your installation in the future, SSH into your server and run <code>forever stop index.js</code> from within the www directory for your account (ie: /home/domain/www/).</li>
</ol>
If you are interested in trying out these steps, <a href="https://leaseweb-redirect.servint.net/">grab an inexpensive VPS or hosting solution from ServInt</a>.
That's it. Best of luck, hope it helps and if you get stuck or have questions, let me know in the comments below.
Cheers, 
Mike

Installing Ghost on ServInt

If you've never heard of <a href="http://ghost.org"> Ghost</a>, you should do yourself a favor and take a look at their website. Ghost is a very interesting and unique new tool for blogging that has recently completed a very successful <a href="http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-blogging-platform"> Kickstarter campaign</a>. Initially requesting only £25,000 to help fund their creation, they ended up raising almost £196,362.
When I first heard about Ghost, I was excited about the prospect of a new blogging platform coming online that might be able to serve a new set of future bloggers with an interface designed purely for blogging. WordPress, although a very capable platform, has simply started to move out of the “just a blogging tool” arena and into a broader market, offering up a great set of tools for creating other types of websites such as those for business, etc. While it's still a great blogging platform, this is no longer it's only purpose and having a tool specifically for just blogging that does it well and beautifully, is certainly appealing.
I'm also a huge fan of simplicity and minimalism (one of the reasons I switched CMS Critic from WP to <a href="/products/processwire/">ProcessWire</a> not too long ago), so when I saw how beautiful the Ghost interface was going to be, I had to jump onboard and become an early adopter.
Check out this video to see why Ghost was created:
[[ghost]]
After watching the video and seeing the passion that John has for his project, I had to try it. I decided to install Ghost on my personal blog, which I've been meaning to get up for quite some time. While the process right now is incredibly complicated (for someone with no technical experience), once I got it up and running, I was able to quickly see why Ghost has such potential. Not only is it incredibly fast running not on Apache or PHP but rather <a href="http://nodejs.org/"> node.js</a>. To get an idea of how the install process works, I've written a post addressing how to get Ghost up and running on a VPS through <a href="http://www.servint.net/index.php?refid=DFC839039622"> ServInt</a>, whom I use as my web host of choice for CMS Critic. You can <a href="http://thatcriticguy.com/">read it here </a> (on my Ghost powered blog, That Critic Guy).
<h2>The Interface</h2>
What I particularly like about Ghost is how simple it is. In the video, you'll see they have a beautiful dashboard showcased. This isn't complete yet so if you choose to test Ghost out now, you won't be able to see it but it's planned to be released within the coming months. What does work is the publishing interface and yes, it's missing some functionality given that this is an early development release but they are making progress quickly.
Here's how the back end of Ghost looks to me on my blog, That Critic Guy when I log in:
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/2013-11-11_07_11_23-mozilla_firefox1125x0.png" alt="Ghost interface" />
Pretty simple isn't it?
What I like the most is the way that Ghost handles writing. The way it works is you write in the left pane in Markdown Syntax (which is super easy to use by the way) and on the right, everything is previewed live.
<img src="https://cmscritic.com/ms-content/uploads/2023/08/2013-11-11_07_05_55-ghost_blogging_platform_features.png" alt="Ghost - Writing" />
It's an elegant. yet simple interface that feels good to write with. In fact, I dare say it made me want to write more often just to use the interface.
Is it done yet? No, it still is in the development process although it's most certainly usable for those of you who, like me, have no patience and like getting their hands dirty. They are planning to launch the hosted version of their platform within the next few months along with the cool dashboard you saw in their video around the same time.
Ghost has some amazing potential and considering they are not in it for the money, but rather to make the web a better place for bloggers, they've got my support. If you are tech-minded enough and feel you can handle the process of trying out Ghost, give it a try. Alternatively, you can wait for their hosted version to come online in the next few months.
There is already a solid selection of Ghost themes available on Themeforest as well.
<a href="http://ghost.org"> Check out Ghost. </a> or see it running on my personal blog, That Critic Guy.

The Beauty and Potential of Ghost

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