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).
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