On Monday October 14th the Ghost – Just a blogging plarform – was publicly released. I won’t tell you the history (you can read it and some other interesting news in this blog post) but will reveal some of my thoughts and concerns.
First of all – Ghost is cool. At least from designers perspective so far. It gives them ability to fully show their muscles in typography and some-other-things-that-I-can’t-even-name-as-I’m-not-a-designer.
All the so called “slicers” (that convert PSDs of whatever not HTML format into nicely looking HTML5+CSS3+JS) will love this platform too – they are already familiar with all the technologies used in its themes. And Handlebars library is super easy to use and extend (but more about this a bit later).
Ghost is nearly awesome for bloggers (that have ability to install it OR uses some installers from DigitalOcean or similar) – it’s clean, focused on content, there are as little disturbing factors in its admin area as possible. You just write, insert images and publish. Profit!
Even premium themes are already there – take a look on Themeforest for some nice one, and on Ghost Marketplace too.
I have played with Ghost for several days and here is what I can say – not so good developer experience. I decided to create a theme (Aniu) and faced with such problems:
- no ability to create any settings for a theme; unfortunately, because of the trend of having tons of options 99% of themes (for WordPress though) does have options, giving users more flexibility;
- no ability to have some custom functions (used PHP terminology, or helpers from Handlebars.js) – you are stuck with the default ones from Handlebars or Ghost;
- no API for creating plugins so far (yes, I know about Roadmap and plans for 0.4)
I fully understand, that the project is young and will definitely evolve in the future, but these 3 issues are really disappointing. So for now I give up with Ghost and will wait for at least 0.4 (actually – plugins’ API or theme settings).
I am using ghost to start up my blog right now, I have spent months working with wordpress in the past and I just absolutely hate it. I like ghost because it is exactly what I want, a blog. Not a entire news site with all this stuff I don’t need. It is young, and sure I would love to have some plugins, but I’m building my own using node.js which I mean isn’t that hard to do if you like node. Best of luck!
Ghost is cool, no doubts. I just like flexibility (so to say – plugins). Waiting for Ghost 0.4 – and I will come back to it. I have no experience working with Ghost, although know js and handlebars.