John O'Nolan

Ghost 5.0 β€” Publishing, newsletters, memberships & subscriptions

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Ghost 5.0 is the latest major release of Ghost, now with support for member analytics, multiple newsletters, custom tiers, simple design settings, and much more.

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John O'Nolan
Hi ProductHunt! πŸ‘‹ It's been 9 years since the first version of Ghost launched on Kickstarter and today we're excited to launch the 5th major version of the platform. Around this time last year, we launched the first public version of Ghost with memberships and subscriptions built-in natively. Ever since then, we've been sprinting to keep up with demand as the creator economy has taken off at full-tilt. So, the major focus of this release has been expanding on that core foundation and delivering a set of features to help creators build successful indie businesses themselves. You can click through to the post if you want the full run-down, but here's a quick overview of what's new: πŸ“¬ Ghost can now run *multiple* newsletters for different types of content, each with their own sender names, branding and subscription lists. πŸ“ˆ We completely overhauled the dashboard to make it more powerful, with revenue, engagement and native email stats, at a glance. πŸ’° Custom subscription tiers make it possible to offer your audience more ways to become paid subscribers, and a native offers feature allows you to grow your revenue (still with 0% payment fees). ✍️ A host of new cards in the Ghost editor allow publishers to add GIFs, call outs, toggles, products, videos, audio, and much more to their content. πŸ’… We've released several official new open source themes and introduced new ways to customise brand settings for websites and newsletters, directly inside Ghost Admin. βž• Plus, brand new developer tutorials, performance improvements, and much more Full changelog here: https://ghost.org/changelog/5/ Ghost is now a team of 31, with $5M annual revenue. Still completely open source, still non-profit, still remote, still decentralised, still growing, and still got love for the streets. We can't wait to see what you do with 5.0 β€” and we'll be hanging out in the comments all day to chat ✌️
John O'Nolan
@fares_aktouf Cheers Fares πŸ™Œ
Uri Bram
@johnonolan Incredible, well done to the whole team
John O'Nolan
@uri_bram Thank you for all your belief and support that helped get us here!
Al Khan
@johnonolan This is incredible! Definitely a step further from 4.0. The dashboard looks fantastic. Kudos to the team!
John O'Nolan
@alcaan Cheers Al!
ilya
I love Ghost to bits. One of the best tools for the creator economy πŸ–€ It powers our newsletter Maker Stations where we feature high-quality, in-depth interviews with creators and makers about their workspaces. As independent creators, all we need to do is hit the Publish button and see the audience grow. That’s it β€” Ghost has removed the barriers between our subscribers and us. If blogging is a marathon… well, then Ghost gave us damn good trainers πŸ‘Ÿ
John O'Nolan
@ilyailford Maker stations is beautiful 😍 we just featured it on https://ghost.org/creators/
James Loh
@ilyailford really, really love Maker Stations! The variety of different workstations is amazing. Does not do good things for my wallet πŸ˜…
Naz Avo
@ilyailford Maker Stations often inspires me to wanna get a home and build a proper workspace πŸ˜…πŸ˜…πŸ˜…
David Bauer
Audience analytics had been one of Ghost's very few weak spots β€” no more. This is big!
John O'Nolan
@davidbauer More on the way in that department! :)
Rob Hope ⚑️Yo!
What an evolution! Having audited several Landing Pages for Ghost customers I can vouch the calibre of publications is much higher than any other platforms I deal with. Ghost has become the go-to for anyone wanting to build a sustainable publishing business. High Fives πŸ– (excuse the pun)
John O'Nolan
@robhope Love the pun, and love to hear this! πŸ€— Showcased a bunch of the top creators and publishers on Ghost now with the updated site. The quality is honestly amazing
levelsio
Congrats! Are you seeing an influx of people moving from Wordpress, Wix, Substack etc. to Ghost now?
John O'Nolan
@levelsio Yes! We've actually hired a whole new team to deal with the demand from this, and help people migrate. A lot of people who start on Substack eventually end up moving to Ghost once their revenue passes around about $50k/ARR because at that point the difference in price becomes pretty huge, and it usually coincides with the time that publishers are going full-time on their new venture, and looking for more fine-grained control over their site and their brand. Migrating is pretty straightforward, and leave all existing Stripe subscriptions in tact so there's very little disruption. There's a solid majority of people featured on https://ghost.org/publishers/ who started out on a different platform, first.
Iain Broome
This is all marvellous. I've been using Ghost for a year with the intention of turning a humble newsletter into a full membership programme. Being able to now run multiple newsletters is the one thing I've been waiting for and it looks amazing. Well done team!
John O'Nolan
@iainbroome Thanks so much Iain! Multiple newsletters was incredibly involved to make happen, but I'm super excited to see what everyone builds with it :)
Vladislav Zhuravlev
Wow, I like graphs and numbers - they don't lie :) The analytics seem nice. Congratulations on the release, thanks for sharing!
John O'Nolan
@vladislav_zhuravlev Truth behind 5.0: Actually we just wanted to play with numbers and graphs ourselves πŸ˜…
Maria Alexandrova
Great launch πŸš€! I love the idea.
John O'Nolan
@maria_alexandrova1 Thanks so much Maria!
Juan Carrillo
Let's go! πŸš€ Just updated my own website and it was a breeze, no issues found. Thank you!
John O'Nolan
@juancarrillo That was QUICK πŸ’ͺ
Jeffrey Wyman
came here to upvote. using ghost heavily for years now, one of my favorites on producthunt
John O'Nolan
@jeffrey_wyman We appreciate you! πŸ™Œ
Marc Perel
I love that you managed to add some great features without ruining the core experience like some platforms! Amazing work to everyone at Ghost, well done πŸ˜ƒ
John O'Nolan
@marcperel Thank you as always Marc! <3
Sean O'Sullivan
Congratulations on version 5.0 @johnonolan. I was one of the original Ghost kickstarters back in the day, as I believed in what you were trying to achieve. Really exciting to see how far Ghost has come along since then.
John O'Nolan
@seanosullivanuk Thanks so much for being around for almost a decade! We never would have gotten this far without the original Kickstarter backers like yourself who helped Ghost get off the ground :)
Simon Schmid
Been there since day 1 (well, since the Kickstarter days). Love every single update and will also run this one asap (finally Members and Tiers with final, stable APIs)!
John O'Nolan
@s2imon Can't believe how may Kickstarter backers there are in this thread!! Thank you <3
Simon Schmid
@johnonolan yeah, the Kickstarter was held very shortly before me joining forces with iubenda (like a few days before, maybe it's time we finally looked into an integration ;)
John O'Nolan
@s2imon That's actually a great idea, drop me an email? john@ghost.org
Bhavik Singh Minhas
Ghost made me leave WordPress (wherein I had an annual investment north of $600) after 5 years. It's good! It's damn good! And it's been 9 years since the first version, @johnonolan ? Patience is sweet, eh? All the best for your journey ahead and wish the very best to your team.
John O'Nolan
@bhavikminhas Thank you! And yes - though I still can't quite decide if it feels like it's been much longer than 9 years, or much shorter. Feels like both simultaneously πŸ˜…
Martin Verbic
I don't know why anyone would consider a different tool for writing online. Awesome tool, awesome community! Super excited for what's coming!😬
John O'Nolan
@marteensart We appreciate you! πŸ™Œ
Everett Berry
Great to see this! > For developers: Ghost's production stack is now Ubuntu 20, Node 16, MySQL8
John O'Nolan
@everett_berry We're pretty excited about it too πŸ˜…
Jay Novak
My No1 publishing platform to go to ❀️
John O'Nolan
@jerzy_nowak_pl ❀️❀️
Jeremy Finch
Congrats on the continued innovation. Enjoying the custom cards.
Maria
Totally awesome! I love Ghost's features! *_* Congrats on the launch! ^__^ Can you tell me please is it possible to have more teammates on one account? :))
John O'Nolan
@maria_brm Yes it is :)
gaurav arora
Congrats on the launch!