👋 Hey Product Hunters! This is the 3rd major iteration (the first was 0) of the Ghost open source publishing platform. There’s a blog post linked above which talks about everything new and shiny included in this release, but I thought I’d share a bit more of the product story here for people who are interested in how the sausage gets made (can’t believe there’s no sausage emoji tbh) 👻 The Backstory Ghost launched in 2013 on Kickstarter as a new take on the traditional blogging platform. The difference: Deeply focused on publishing (rather than generic website-building), blazing fast modern codebase, fully open source permissive MIT license, with a sustainable business model, structured as an independent non-profit organisation. To date, there’s still not a single other platform which offers all those things in one place! 🚀 Now We've done about 200 releases, several million downloads, seen 500,000 sites running on Ghost (Including Apple, Tinder, DuckDuckGo, Mozilla, OpenAI and many more) — and the software has matured a long way since the early the days. v2.0 is quite a departure, in many ways, from some of the initial principles which we started out with. The way we make product decisions has definitely evolved 👇🏼 I mentioned in our 5 year anniversary post - https://blog.ghost.org/5/ - that one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned over time is that open/decentralised products fundamentally compete on power and flexibility, rather than outright simplicity. So while Ghost started out as an attempt to be as simple as possible, 2018 for us has been all about opening things up with more power. We’re moving away from “markdown-only” and “a single stream of posts -only” as the way to write and read posts in Ghost - in two major ways: ✍️ We’ve shipped a rich, extensible editor which you could loosely think of as “Medium meets Slack-Integrations, built on an open document storage format” — the likes of which exists nowhere else in open source. 🏠 And we’re enabling full site-structure control, meaning entirely new architectures, formats and collections of content are possible. Use whatever custom homepages, subdirectories, or route structures you want. All of this represents a very conscious move to stay true Ghost’s core focus of publishing but make it more suitable to professional users who need more than just simple blogging :) 📢 Will be hanging around here all day if anyone has any questions

Congrats! How do you see the future of journalism/publishing and the role of Ghost in that? You seem to have moved from being "a lightweight Wordpress" years ago to having a much bigger mission now. I think you've mentioned becoming a platform for paid publishing: where journalists and writers can self-host (or through you) and accept Patreon-style subscriptions. Is that what's next?

Congrats Ghost team!! Happy user for years here, and can't wait to dig into the new extensible editor of yours (could come in handy for our team ). Out of curiosity, why Slate, Draft or other js OSS editors were not good enough for you? Keep up the great work!

Wow, as expected the UX of your new editor looks great! I remember beta testing it when you first started working on the feature but it's come a long way. I have some questions: 🗂 How far do you think you'll take cards? Are you going to stick to the writing experience first and foremost or are you going to iterate into the "site builder" space with these? ✏️ Content types are a welcome addition, is it easy for developers to integrate custom data into these types? Meta data like for example exif data for a photo content type? 🖼 Do you have any plans for new themes which support content types (or think this is something developers should look into building)?

I’m speechless. The execution is A1+. Thanks for sharing such a great software 💪👏.

Congratulations! Koenig is amazing and dynamic routing is 👌. Some questions. Will Koenig have better support for other languages besides english? Or english will be the focus and contributors will handle the other? In the future, do you think developers will be able to create custom cards? What will be your next big thing for Ghost in terms of development? Apps. Media Library, Subscriptions/Membership, real-time editing (like Google Docs). Will there be a native way to implement a search in Ghost? I'm working on a library right now. Just curious. Do you think that in the future we will be able to update Ghost from Dashboard? Or is it too risky?

Happy using Ghost as it fits exactly what I need, but how does it compare to its competition in 2018 - what changes have you made to keep ahead?

We are currently exploring the possibilities to look beyond WordPress for our website. So this announcement comes at a perfect time. I immediately installed the local/dev version to check out some of the new features. I am very interested in the multi-language configuration. Is this available already for self-hosted installations?

The new editor is just breathtaking, I will definitely be doing a video tutorial & review about 2.0 soon, can't stop looking at it! 😎

It's easy to use and maintain. The administration features are good. There's plenty of themes. It's easy to use overall. Also, since it's running on nodejs, performance is better than most CMS platforms. If it weren't for the lack of creation and update actions in the API, this would be the best CMS. (Yes, they exist, but they are private, not documentated and can change any second.) Unfortunately for some people like me who heavily rely on APIs for making posts, I have to stay with Wordpress for now especially since it has API clients that do everything we want.

Pros:

Configurable, Mature, Good Performance, Good UI

Cons:

API is lacking - creation and update of posts not finalized

I love Ghost, still missing the search. :(

I love the new design. I specifically haven't been using Ghost because I hated the markdown editor, this is far more intuitive. Although I'm now considering it as an option as I need to migrate my site within the next week. Also I have a question about the editor - does it not accept embedded html that includes div tags? Just tried to insert an audio player and it wouldn't inject into the page. The only negative I'd say is the cost. It's expensive. I'd love to see the price points of Ghost Pro lowered considering this is pushed as being the best option for hosting.

Custom routing! I was actually just thinking about this last night and whether it's possible or not. Perfect timing. Excited to play around with it. Cheers John!

Well done.

I am huge Ghost CMS fan! I just want to thank you for creating Ghost! It has changed the way I write and it makes me write more often.

Great job ! 😊

I use Ghost to maintain a personal archive of notes and links to interesting discoveries. I love its simplicity and, as a Markdown user of many, many years, I love its Markdown friendly interface.

Pros:

It's lovely: ease of use, Markdown, overall elegance.

Cons:

Speaking personally, none.

Congrats guys!

What do you see as the benefits to using Ghost Pro over competitors like Squarespace, which are considerably less expensive? Does it not make business sense (maybe support costs/etc) for you to offer more minimal plans for very small personal sites/blogs? I assume possibly not- since unlike Squarespace, you offer the code which provides the ability for your users to find more affordable hosting as needed and self-host?

Congrats on 2.0! Ghost has always been a really impressive open source project to me -- It has a level of polish you don't typically see in open source projects and in general I think the decision making process in terms of product features has been spot on. As a developer though what really impressed me was how easy it was to get running locally and contribute to. Before Ghost I had never really seen an open source project that was that simple to get started developing on.