Ghost: Blogging Platform Review

There are a lot of bloggers out there that lurks around the internet. With this, several blogging platforms are surfacing with different features to offer. In this particular article, we will be dealing with the Ghost blogging platform. We will get to know its features, pros, and cons.

What is Ghost?

In the world of internet, Ghost is a blogging platform which is dedicated to audiences that prefer full control over creating their websites with the code on the table. It is a content-first kind of blog platform with a very minimalistic look. The platform greatly gives the HTML-savvy users the liberty to let their creativity decide on their own blog thru code.

So, how does it work?

Ghost is basically a Node.js kind of application. It is powered by the Express framework. Ghost runs pretty much anywhere because of how it ships with SQLite. However, everything is connected through JugglingDB ORM, this adds future support for a lot of other database formats.

The Ghost will be available via NPM, making it extremely simple (and fast!) to install on all major environments.

Ghost theming is done with Handlebars, which keeps our business and view logic separated. Mmmm semantic + sexy. If you know how to write WordPress themes, you’ll be writing Ghost themes in under 5 minutes.

Of course, there’s also support for customizing and extending your blog with additional functionality via plugins with helpers and data filters built right into Ghost. We’ll also be supporting full international translations from the word go using Node Polyglot.js.

Finally, Ghost is being released under the MIT License. It’s pretty much the freest pen Source license out there. It means you can do whatever you want with Ghost, and you can choose whatever license you want when you build something with Ghost. Want to release a GPL Ghost theme? That’s fine. Want to release an MIT theme? That’s fine too.

Pricing

The Ghost has three plans to offer: Basic, Standard, and Business. The first plan starts with 100K views per month, then 500K for Standard, and 1M for Business. With staff users, it starts from 2, 5, and 15, respectively. All of the plans have custom domain support and gives you the leverage to own your data. That is only the product usage, there is still a lot of stuff you can discover through their website: Ghost.

👍 Pros
FREE SSL
Fast
Built-in SEO
Affordable
👎 Cons
Not ideal for an e-commerce site
Limited number of themes
It does not really support plugins for more customized features

Final Thoughts

It is no secret how there are already a lot of blogging platforms available. Though Ghost is not as popular as WordPress or Medium, it still has a say in the industry, surely.

You might also want to read this article: WordPress Configuration Tricks You Should Know.

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Ryan Jacob: Ryan Jacob has 9 years of rich experience in Integrated Marketing Communications and Server Management. He has lead teams of professionals in his career and built online and offline reputation of organizations.