10 ms·

Ghost 3.0

300 points by sareiodata 7y ago

jonny383 7y ago
Ghost is still a thing?
- AndrewDucker 7y ago
  I'm curious what your purpose was in leaving this comment? What were you trying to add to the conversation?
  - jonny383 7y ago
    Asking if people actually still use Ghost?
    - scrollaway 7y ago
      And what do you expect the answer to that question to be? They just released a new major version and announced $5MM revenue in the same post. Seriously, think for a second and tell me what you expect the answer to be.
johnonolan 7y ago
Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership system is effectively just an email database with JWT based authentication. Two cool things about this: You can import any CSV of emails and that's now a user database of people who can log in, and 2: not storing passwords at all is pretty great. - New billing features are a deep integration w/ Stripe Billing API, which works with your API keys, not via Stripe Connect, so there's no middleman. Ghost can't add any fees on transactions, and volume doesn't flow through our Stripe account in any way - so it remains completely decentralised without a bottleneck. The significant part of that is: If Ghost the company were to ever go away, your site/billing/everything would keep working as normal. Doesn't depend on us. - All our APIs and Webhooks have been continually improved to the point where Ghost is now the most popular (at least by Github stars, the fruit of life) open source headless CMS out there. Also a new Github Action for CI/CD of Ghost themes makes that whole process a lot less painful "What's the point of this, why not just use [x]" Because [x] is some combination of: closed source, centralised, written in decade old procedural PHP, or has some sort of UI which no non-developer wants to go anywhere near. We try to sit at the juncture of these things with a decentralised product, easy to run with a managed service, built with tech developers don't hate, and a UI that people who create content really love. Also: Something about Postgres On a serious note, thanks for all the support. Ghost launched on HN and it was that initial boost that got everything started. I'll be hanging out in the comments here throughout the day.
- Malfunction92 7y ago
  For a second, that "raised 5 mil" line really made me doubt everything I've learned from you guys until I actually read through the post. Congratulations!
- praveenweb 7y ago
  > Also: Something about Postgres Is Ghost bringing back support for Postgres? :)
- 8458e112e7b2 7y ago
  Congrats on the release and hope Ghost is even more successful now with all the added features. Any idea when 3.0 will be available to self-host?
  - johnonolan 7y ago
    It's immediately available to everyone, self hosted and hosted. Source is here: https://github.com/tryghost/ghost https://github.com/tryghost/ghost
- cpr 7y ago
  Fantastic work, John. I've long wanted to build a web site just to use Ghost. ;-) If you could figure out some way to integrate tightly with Webflow (the world's best html/css codeless site builder), that would be an absolute killer and I'd be all over it in a second (as would many others). I suppose the problem there is that Webflow wants to be its own CMS (naturally), but it's somewhat crippled by being a closed solution.
  - johnonolan 7y ago
    I'm a big webflow fan, would love to see if there's some way to use the platforms together :)
- blissofbeing 7y ago
  The docs page linked in the FAQ is returning a 404: https://ghost.org/docs/members/ https://ghost.org/docs/members/
praveenweb 7y ago
In my experience, Ghost has been the no-nonsense blog CMS that has been stable and just worked with very little maintenance. I like that they are now moving towards static site JAMStack approach, driven by APIs rather than the current SSR model. This lets anybody to customise their themes with the language / framework of choice and generating static builds that can be cached for improved loading times.
nickjj 7y ago
Serious question. In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.". But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business. So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even give yourself a salary if you label yourself as a non-profit? What makes paying yourself a salary as a non-profit different than a regular business? Whenever I read sentences like that, it makes me very suspicious. Whenever I see a Ghost blog post talking about the product it always feels like they try to bring maximum attention to being a non-profit in a way that is supposed to be less evil than a profitable business but then you talk about millions of dollars of "business revenue" and I never understood how it works.
- 83457 7y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization "A nonprofit organization, also known as a non-business entity,[1] not-for-profit organization,[2] or nonprofit institution,[3] is dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a shared point of view. In economic terms, it is an organization that uses its surplus of the revenues to further achieve its ultimate objective, rather than distributing its income to the organization's shareholders, leaders, or members. Nonprofits are tax exempt or charitable, meaning they do not pay income tax on the money that they receive for their organization. They can operate in religious, scientific, research, or educational settings.""
  - nickjj 7y ago
    That's still very confusing. Surplus sounds like anything beyond hosting costs to run the service, but the hosting costs is likely no where near 5 million dollars so a majority of it is surplus. Does that mean no one gets a salary or is a salary part of the costs to run the business instead of being a "member"? If salaries are included who dictates what the income tax exempt salary is? I'm not trolling either. What you're describing sounds like a way to run a business where you can avoid paying income tax while still getting a salary because realistically I doubt the creator of Ghost is living in a homeless shelter and working off public library computers.
therealmarv 7y ago
looks nice. Especially like the membership module and will definitely look more deeply into integration with nuxt.js (wow). One thing I don't like is that the membership api seems deeply integrated with Stripe only. That's okay for a start but in many countries in this world Stripe is not available (for me it's the new PayPal. E.g. I'm based in Cyprus and Stripe will not work here although it's EU) and I would welcome a better flexibility or plugin system for other payment providers: https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0b90f47cd908161171bb40/packages/members-api https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0... Are there any plans for that? Do you think it is easy to integrate other payment providers in future? UPDATE: ok, I've seen your website FAQ https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-providers https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-... I will not support a one payment gateway blog membersite. Sorry Ghost. Stripe censorship excludes basically (beside regions) also many topics. Thinking about writing about intimate topics, erotica or health? Good luck in using Stripe with that.
- johnonolan 7y ago
  This is a first version. We're certainly planning to add more payment options, including decentralised ones
  - Teichopsia 7y ago
    Yes, but when? Stripe has been saying the same thing. They will support more countries, and yet, three years later they have yet to support many countries. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a country can not be supported magically. What I'm against are these comments that are written with (what I believe to be) the best intentions. But then it's posted, and the person who read it, years later is left with a bad taste in his/her mouth.
    - disordinary 7y ago
      It's open source, there's nothing stopping you from integrating it with the payment platform of your choice and contributing the code back to the project.
tvanantwerp 7y ago
Very cool that I can use Ghost as a headless CMS now. Going to have to give it a try.
wlesieutre 7y ago
Looks great, the payments integration is a great idea. I've looked at Ghost on and off while considering setting up my personal site, and pricing is the reason I avoided it. I think they started at $5/month for "Ghost Pro" and are now up to $36 for Pro Basic or $99 for Pro Standard (a bit less purchased in bulk). At a minimum, it's now $348/year. Having paid subscriptions built-in makes that easier to swallow. I don't want any 3rd party ad networks on my site, so subscriptions could help offset the high costs. Wouldn't help me personally since my site isn't very active and wouldn't get subscribers, but I imagine this will work for some other folks.
- maroonedanchor 7y ago
  Have you considered self-hosting a Ghost instance?
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    I did consider it, but I ended up putting a Hugo site on Netlify instead. It's nice to not worry about any database backend or other hosting infrastructure. With Netlify's continuous deployment system being able to run Hugo builds, I should also be able to hook it up to GitHub so that I can post from an iPad without being able to run hugo locally. Haven't gotten around to that, but I think it'll be a good setup.
- Kihashi 7y ago
  I self host on a $5/month VPS and it works fine. Granted, I don't really have much traffic, but it sounds like you don't either.
  - wlesieutre 7y ago
    Not much traffic, no. But "spend as little time administrating it as possible" was a goal that had me looking into managed options. Hugo + Netlify is working well, some up-front work in the setup since I didn't want to use a premade Hugo theme, but when I update anything it just takes two commands to rebuild and upload: hugo netlify deploy --prod I'll eventually simplify that further since Netlify can run hugo builds automatically from changes to a git branch. Beyond that, it's just publish and forget. And the page speed is great (Google scores it at 99) since Netlify is serving it off of a CDN.
pimlottc 7y ago
This article could some background about what Ghost is. There's no explanation until about 6 paragraphs in, and it's only in an image, not in the article itself. > But you probably want to know about the $5M thing. No, I'd rather know about what Ghost is :P
- mdszy 7y ago
  It's almost like you can chop off the /blog/3-0/ part of the URL and it brings you to a magical homepage that explains exactly that. Do you really expect them to explain what their software is in every single blog post they make about it?
  - lijogdfljk 7y ago
    As a general comment, not in any way related to Ghost blog: > It's almost like you can chop off the /blog/3-0/ It's an annoyance of mine in so many company blogs that going to their actual product is so oddly difficult. Sure, I can chop off the URL because I understand what that is, but what about non-technical users? They understand links, not a damn thing goes back to the core product. It's so weird to me that so many blogs are built around user engagement and SEO, while lacking back linking to the actual product at all. I've never understood it, but I see it so so often.
    - pwinnski 7y ago
      You can click on the header without resorting to any URL manipulation. When I load the page, I see ghost, Product, Developers, etc, across the top, and even as I scroll, the 'The Ghost Blog' stays with me, always clickable to reach the homepage. I'm not sure how going to their actual product could be made any more simple or predictable. Do you have a suggestion?
      - lijogdfljk 7y ago
        Nope, I'll edit my post - I was merely talking about what the parent comment said, not anything about Ghost. The fact that they described modifying the URL made me think of so many blogs I see without back links. I wasn't referring to Ghost at all (I mentioned that, but I'll make it more clear). Sorry for any confusion :)
saassucks 7y ago
Another piece of software to nickel-and-dime you. Yay!
- aetimmes 7y ago
  You can self-host Ghost for free: https://github.com/TryGhost https://github.com/TryGhost If you're going to create a new account to hide behind in order to criticize someone else's work, you ought to at least be correct in your criticism.
- bovermyer 7y ago
  This account is suspicious. It appears to have been created solely to denigrate Ghost.
  - mkr-hn 7y ago
    Give the name, I would say they're warming up on Ghost before they take on all of SaaS. Little do they know this kind of thing never lasts.
- dspillett 7y ago
  Or you could install it yourself for nothing (other than your time and hosting costs, of course, but if you have the time spare and a server/VM with available resource already...): https://ghost.org/docs/setup/ https://ghost.org/docs/setup/
  - beardbound 7y ago
    Thanks for the comment. I honestly didn't consider trying it on a VM. I've been thinking of migrating my blog off of wordpress since I don't really like my old design and the actual writing interface isn't great. However I didn't want to have to mess with getting it on my AWS instance if it wasn't going to work. I'll stage it up locally and see how I like it. I used ghost for a while in the 1.0 days, but I had an issue with an upgrade and I ended up switching back to wordpress. I also was super into single pane transparent design at the time. These days I just want my writing to be easy to read and navigate. Cheers, and thanks again.
bovermyer 7y ago
This is definitely targeted squarely at the publishing industry. Newspapers that have yet to build their own CMS should seriously consider using this to power their digital presence. This, from my experience as a developer and ops engineer for a newspaper.
EnderMB 7y ago
I remember when Ghost was released years ago, and I remember thinking "wow, these people have actually gone and released a solid blogging platform to replace the shitshow that is WordPress!". At the time, I was making some decent freelance money from porting botched WordPress builds onto the Umbraco CMS, so my opinion of WP has always been pretty low. Ghost looked like a fantastic publishing tool that was ahead of its time. Obviously, things have changed a lot since then, and to be honest I never really kept much of an eye on Ghost until two people I used to work with started working for Ghost. Now, Ghost is being pushed as a headless CMS, and seems heavily aligned to the JAM stack. From what I've seen and heard, this looks like a fantastic release and you should all be proud of this milestone, and just how far Ghost has come. With that being said, there's a niggling thought in my head that won't go away. What's to stop Ghost from becoming WordPress v2?
- johnonolan 7y ago
  In theory: Nothing! In reality: The same thing that has prevented that from happening for the last 6 years; a strong focus on a core set of usecases and no desire to become a generic website builder :)
quaffapint 7y ago
Any plans for a multi tenant setup with memberships?
vivin 7y ago
Has the JSON file structure changed in v3? I am trying to migrate from WordPress to Ghost and I was going to use v2, but now that v3 is out, I would like to migrate to v3. (https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/ https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/)
- erisds 7y ago
  It hasn't changed (see https://ghost.org/docs/api/v3/migration/ https://ghost.org/docs/api/v3/migration/) But also, https://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ has been overhauled to export from WP into a format you can import straight into Ghost 3.0.
  - vivin 7y ago
    That is awesome -- I was looking to roll my own. This will make it much easier.
eugenekolo 7y ago
Ghost is okay. My blog runs Ghost. I've been using Ghost from about when it was first released, v.09 or something. I am now planning on moving towards something more static and simpler. Ghost started as a simpler alternative to WordPress, but slightly more powerful than Hugo/Jekyll/etc. It now seems to just be a WordPress clone written in JS instead of PHP. It's still fine and works well... but, I can't see a reason to use it versus WordPress and its lost roots to its simplicity. I will probably be migrating to Jekyll for easier self hosting and hacking. Perhaps I'll stick with Ghost... but, I'm starting to become weary of "commercial open source" products. Self hosting is becoming harder and harder... it's in their best interest to make you buy the managed solution. It looks like Ghost has transitioned to a product for media corps, in that sense it looks good and I'd use it. For personal usage, I can't recommend it anymore.
- jjjbokma 7y ago
  If you like to hack in Python or Perl maybe have a peek at tumblelog [0]? I am currently working on version 4.0.0. and I don't think you can get more static and simpler except for running an older version. You can see it in action here: http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/ [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
- blairbeckwith 7y ago
  I’m not sure how anyone can say in good faith that Ghost is “just a Wordpress clone”. Even a cursory walkthrough if the dashboard shows this to absolutely not be the case.
- jamesgeck0 7y ago
  > I will probably be migrating to Jekyll for easier self hosting and hacking. I was thinking of swapping to Hugo, but Ghost 3.0's static site integrations looks it means that I can just run Ghost on my local machine and upload plan HTML to the server. Seems like the best of both worlds.
- alexmingoia 7y ago
  If you’re looking for a simpler alternative to Ghost for personal blogging, without the hassle of self-hosting, check out https://etch.blog https://etch.blog - it’s bootstrapped, simple, affordable, and free of nonsense.
spraveenitpro 7y ago
Doesn't WordPress already do this?
thesorrow 7y ago
I wonder if taking the JAMStack route won't prevent you to become a real alternative to Medium by making ActivityPub (federation) implementation harder ?
- johnonolan 7y ago
  Watch this space :)
  - thesorrow 7y ago
    If ActivityPub is the next big feature count me in !
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
benfrain 7y ago
Native comment system yet?
40four 7y ago
Great to see a new major release! I have used Ghost in a couple of projects, and I am always impressed with the functionality & the flexibility to use it how you want. The built in editor and admin panel is great, but the real sweetness comes from the REST API. The ability to integrate into any custom website is fantastic!
fortran77 7y ago
Will the fans of Norton Ghost be complaining, the way the Elm MUA people complain about Elm the programming language? https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx
- LeoPanthera 7y ago
  I had to scroll down before I realised that this is not the disk imaging tool "Ghost". I've been retired from IT for a few years now - is Ghost (the disk utility) no longer a thing? I couldn't even guess how many hours I spent sitting in front of this screen: https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-ghost.jpg https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-ghost.jpg
  - fortran77 7y ago
    Actually, its the first think I think of too. Now I use Acronis True Image (which works very well on Windows and I can recover from a dead boot drive in no time!)
dpeck 7y ago
Congratulations on the release. I like the direction that they're going and it feels like the only thing that it is missing to be able to replace the backend on a LOT of sites is being able to add some type of custom fields (simple key values) to posts. That combined with the subscription/membership they've added here would be an very powerful platform for many uses.
kstrauser 7y ago
I dig Ghost, but there are any number of client apps (like MarsEdit) that play great with WordPress but not at all with Ghost. Are there plugins that let it support a more widely used API so that it works well with those clients?
bbx 7y ago
I've never tried Ghost, although their website always appealed to me (one of the best designed website I know). I've been using WordPress for the past 13 years, for personal and also professional projects, which means the familiarity I've built with building custom themes never drew me towards trying another CMS. But going through this blog post announcement, I saw that Ghost can be used as a headless CMS with frontend frameworks. And since I started using GatsbyJS extensively in the past year, it seems like something that would work _really_ well together. (It turns out that the official website is actually built with GatsbyJS, so the integration is probably really robust.) Gonna try it out! And congrats on remaining true to your initial philosophy.
tjbiddle 7y ago
Congrats! Slightly off-topic question: Is a handful of the Ghost team based in Bali? I know the team is 100% remote and I've noticed multiple laptops with Ghost stickers at my co-working center.
- johnonolan 7y ago
  Not permanently, but there were quite a few of us in Bali this year (I think 7 at one point) working from Tropical Nomad. Now we've all moved on again!
brianpgordon 7y ago
> The hard part is the publishing platform to integrate with the subscriptions and the billing - that's the part nobody else is doing - and we were getting pretty good at building a flexible, modern publishing platform. Doesn't Medium sort of do this? I get that you can't run your own instance or bill specifically for just your content, but otherwise it seems very similar.
- emdowling 7y ago
  The two caveats/differences you mentioned are the biggest complaints against Medium. Medium is a fantastic platform for finding an audience when you don’t have one already. It’s an awesome way to just write and get your work out there. As the post mentions, Ghost 3.0 is targeted at people like Ben Thompson (in the extreme case) who have an audience passionate/supportive/large enough to pay them directly and who want to own the entire relationship with no middleman.
tylermenezes 7y ago
The most shocking thing about this post, to me, is that they've only made $5M revenue in 6 years. After expenses, that's got to be a really small profit.
- elicash 7y ago
  Is this low for open source projects? I mean, I'd imagine it's low compared to WordPress.org -- but compared to other projects of its size this doesn't seem low to me.
antigirl 7y ago
I was the initial backer for Ghost when it was first on kickstarter, i was very excited about the prospect. But after it release i felt quite cheated. The progress was insanely slow, there were a discussion about responsive images on their github which lasted probably months before anything was done about it. It was very limiting still months after its initial release. Naturally i lost interest.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
artpi 7y ago
Fantastic work John! The membership feature looks amazing and I honestly am very impressed by your landing page since I work on something a bit similar :). The Stripe Billing integration sounds exciting, but I am curious about the 0% transaction fees. Stripe usually takes 2.9%+30c on charges and Stripe Billing costs 0.4$ (free for the first $1M so we can ignore that). Did you negotiate some kind of a special deal with Stripe or the 0% means that YOU don't take additional fees, but Stripe fees are still there?
- johnonolan 7y ago
  You connect your own Stripe account - so whatever fees are there are specific to your setup. They vary widely based on your country, the customer's country, currency and volume. The main difference with Ghost is that there are no additional platform transaction fees - which there usually are with every other product in this space (generally another +5% - +10%. Hope that helps to clarify!

Ghost 3.0

300 points by sareiodata 7y ago

jonny383 7y ago

Ghost is still a thing?

AndrewDucker 7y ago
I'm curious what your purpose was in leaving this comment? What were you trying to add to the conversation?
- jonny383 7y ago
  Asking if people actually still use Ghost?
  - scrollaway 7y ago
    And what do you expect the answer to that question to be? They just released a new major version and announced $5MM revenue in the same post. Seriously, think for a second and tell me what you expect the answer to be.

johnonolan 7y ago

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership system is effectively just an email database with JWT based authentication. Two cool things about this: You can import any CSV of emails and that's now a user database of people who can log in, and 2: not storing passwords at all is pretty great. - New billing features are a deep integration w/ Stripe Billing API, which works with your API keys, not via Stripe Connect, so there's no middleman. Ghost can't add any fees on transactions, and volume doesn't flow through our Stripe account in any way - so it remains completely decentralised without a bottleneck. The significant part of that is: If Ghost the company were to ever go away, your site/billing/everything would keep working as normal. Doesn't depend on us. - All our APIs and Webhooks have been continually improved to the point where Ghost is now the most popular (at least by Github stars, the fruit of life) open source headless CMS out there. Also a new Github Action for CI/CD of Ghost themes makes that whole process a lot less painful "What's the point of this, why not just use [x]" Because [x] is some combination of: closed source, centralised, written in decade old procedural PHP, or has some sort of UI which no non-developer wants to go anywhere near. We try to sit at the juncture of these things with a decentralised product, easy to run with a managed service, built with tech developers don't hate, and a UI that people who create content really love. Also: Something about Postgres On a serious note, thanks for all the support. Ghost launched on HN and it was that initial boost that got everything started. I'll be hanging out in the comments here throughout the day.

Malfunction92 7y ago
For a second, that "raised 5 mil" line really made me doubt everything I've learned from you guys until I actually read through the post. Congratulations!
praveenweb 7y ago
> Also: Something about Postgres Is Ghost bringing back support for Postgres? :)
8458e112e7b2 7y ago
Congrats on the release and hope Ghost is even more successful now with all the added features. Any idea when 3.0 will be available to self-host?
- johnonolan 7y ago
  It's immediately available to everyone, self hosted and hosted. Source is here: https://github.com/tryghost/ghost https://github.com/tryghost/ghost
cpr 7y ago
Fantastic work, John. I've long wanted to build a web site just to use Ghost. ;-) If you could figure out some way to integrate tightly with Webflow (the world's best html/css codeless site builder), that would be an absolute killer and I'd be all over it in a second (as would many others). I suppose the problem there is that Webflow wants to be its own CMS (naturally), but it's somewhat crippled by being a closed solution.
- johnonolan 7y ago
  I'm a big webflow fan, would love to see if there's some way to use the platforms together :)
blissofbeing 7y ago
The docs page linked in the FAQ is returning a 404: https://ghost.org/docs/members/ https://ghost.org/docs/members/

praveenweb 7y ago

In my experience, Ghost has been the no-nonsense blog CMS that has been stable and just worked with very little maintenance. I like that they are now moving towards static site JAMStack approach, driven by APIs rather than the current SSR model. This lets anybody to customise their themes with the language / framework of choice and generating static builds that can be cached for improved loading times.

nickjj 7y ago

Serious question. In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.". But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business. So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even give yourself a salary if you label yourself as a non-profit? What makes paying yourself a salary as a non-profit different than a regular business? Whenever I read sentences like that, it makes me very suspicious. Whenever I see a Ghost blog post talking about the product it always feels like they try to bring maximum attention to being a non-profit in a way that is supposed to be less evil than a profitable business but then you talk about millions of dollars of "business revenue" and I never understood how it works.

83457 7y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization "A nonprofit organization, also known as a non-business entity,[1] not-for-profit organization,[2] or nonprofit institution,[3] is dedicated to furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a shared point of view. In economic terms, it is an organization that uses its surplus of the revenues to further achieve its ultimate objective, rather than distributing its income to the organization's shareholders, leaders, or members. Nonprofits are tax exempt or charitable, meaning they do not pay income tax on the money that they receive for their organization. They can operate in religious, scientific, research, or educational settings.""
- nickjj 7y ago
  That's still very confusing. Surplus sounds like anything beyond hosting costs to run the service, but the hosting costs is likely no where near 5 million dollars so a majority of it is surplus. Does that mean no one gets a salary or is a salary part of the costs to run the business instead of being a "member"? If salaries are included who dictates what the income tax exempt salary is? I'm not trolling either. What you're describing sounds like a way to run a business where you can avoid paying income tax while still getting a salary because realistically I doubt the creator of Ghost is living in a homeless shelter and working off public library computers.

therealmarv 7y ago

looks nice. Especially like the membership module and will definitely look more deeply into integration with nuxt.js (wow). One thing I don't like is that the membership api seems deeply integrated with Stripe only. That's okay for a start but in many countries in this world Stripe is not available (for me it's the new PayPal. E.g. I'm based in Cyprus and Stripe will not work here although it's EU) and I would welcome a better flexibility or plugin system for other payment providers: https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0b90f47cd908161171bb40/packages/members-api https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0... Are there any plans for that? Do you think it is easy to integrate other payment providers in future? UPDATE: ok, I've seen your website FAQ https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-providers https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-... I will not support a one payment gateway blog membersite. Sorry Ghost. Stripe censorship excludes basically (beside regions) also many topics. Thinking about writing about intimate topics, erotica or health? Good luck in using Stripe with that.

johnonolan 7y ago
This is a first version. We're certainly planning to add more payment options, including decentralised ones
- Teichopsia 7y ago
  Yes, but when? Stripe has been saying the same thing. They will support more countries, and yet, three years later they have yet to support many countries. Don't get me wrong, I understand that a country can not be supported magically. What I'm against are these comments that are written with (what I believe to be) the best intentions. But then it's posted, and the person who read it, years later is left with a bad taste in his/her mouth.
  - disordinary 7y ago
    It's open source, there's nothing stopping you from integrating it with the payment platform of your choice and contributing the code back to the project.

tvanantwerp 7y ago

Very cool that I can use Ghost as a headless CMS now. Going to have to give it a try.

wlesieutre 7y ago

Looks great, the payments integration is a great idea. I've looked at Ghost on and off while considering setting up my personal site, and pricing is the reason I avoided it. I think they started at $5/month for "Ghost Pro" and are now up to $36 for Pro Basic or $99 for Pro Standard (a bit less purchased in bulk). At a minimum, it's now $348/year. Having paid subscriptions built-in makes that easier to swallow. I don't want any 3rd party ad networks on my site, so subscriptions could help offset the high costs. Wouldn't help me personally since my site isn't very active and wouldn't get subscribers, but I imagine this will work for some other folks.

maroonedanchor 7y ago
Have you considered self-hosting a Ghost instance?
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  I did consider it, but I ended up putting a Hugo site on Netlify instead. It's nice to not worry about any database backend or other hosting infrastructure. With Netlify's continuous deployment system being able to run Hugo builds, I should also be able to hook it up to GitHub so that I can post from an iPad without being able to run hugo locally. Haven't gotten around to that, but I think it'll be a good setup.
Kihashi 7y ago
I self host on a $5/month VPS and it works fine. Granted, I don't really have much traffic, but it sounds like you don't either.
- wlesieutre 7y ago
  Not much traffic, no. But "spend as little time administrating it as possible" was a goal that had me looking into managed options. Hugo + Netlify is working well, some up-front work in the setup since I didn't want to use a premade Hugo theme, but when I update anything it just takes two commands to rebuild and upload: hugo netlify deploy --prod I'll eventually simplify that further since Netlify can run hugo builds automatically from changes to a git branch. Beyond that, it's just publish and forget. And the page speed is great (Google scores it at 99) since Netlify is serving it off of a CDN.

pimlottc 7y ago

This article could some background about what Ghost is. There's no explanation until about 6 paragraphs in, and it's only in an image, not in the article itself. > But you probably want to know about the $5M thing. No, I'd rather know about what Ghost is :P

mdszy 7y ago
It's almost like you can chop off the /blog/3-0/ part of the URL and it brings you to a magical homepage that explains exactly that. Do you really expect them to explain what their software is in every single blog post they make about it?
- lijogdfljk 7y ago
  As a general comment, not in any way related to Ghost blog: > It's almost like you can chop off the /blog/3-0/ It's an annoyance of mine in so many company blogs that going to their actual product is so oddly difficult. Sure, I can chop off the URL because I understand what that is, but what about non-technical users? They understand links, not a damn thing goes back to the core product. It's so weird to me that so many blogs are built around user engagement and SEO, while lacking back linking to the actual product at all. I've never understood it, but I see it so so often.
  - pwinnski 7y ago
    You can click on the header without resorting to any URL manipulation. When I load the page, I see ghost, Product, Developers, etc, across the top, and even as I scroll, the 'The Ghost Blog' stays with me, always clickable to reach the homepage. I'm not sure how going to their actual product could be made any more simple or predictable. Do you have a suggestion?
    - lijogdfljk 7y ago
      Nope, I'll edit my post - I was merely talking about what the parent comment said, not anything about Ghost. The fact that they described modifying the URL made me think of so many blogs I see without back links. I wasn't referring to Ghost at all (I mentioned that, but I'll make it more clear). Sorry for any confusion :)

saassucks 7y ago

Another piece of software to nickel-and-dime you. Yay!

aetimmes 7y ago
You can self-host Ghost for free: https://github.com/TryGhost https://github.com/TryGhost If you're going to create a new account to hide behind in order to criticize someone else's work, you ought to at least be correct in your criticism.
bovermyer 7y ago
This account is suspicious. It appears to have been created solely to denigrate Ghost.
- mkr-hn 7y ago
  Give the name, I would say they're warming up on Ghost before they take on all of SaaS. Little do they know this kind of thing never lasts.
dspillett 7y ago
Or you could install it yourself for nothing (other than your time and hosting costs, of course, but if you have the time spare and a server/VM with available resource already...): https://ghost.org/docs/setup/ https://ghost.org/docs/setup/
- beardbound 7y ago
  Thanks for the comment. I honestly didn't consider trying it on a VM. I've been thinking of migrating my blog off of wordpress since I don't really like my old design and the actual writing interface isn't great. However I didn't want to have to mess with getting it on my AWS instance if it wasn't going to work. I'll stage it up locally and see how I like it. I used ghost for a while in the 1.0 days, but I had an issue with an upgrade and I ended up switching back to wordpress. I also was super into single pane transparent design at the time. These days I just want my writing to be easy to read and navigate. Cheers, and thanks again.

bovermyer 7y ago

This is definitely targeted squarely at the publishing industry. Newspapers that have yet to build their own CMS should seriously consider using this to power their digital presence. This, from my experience as a developer and ops engineer for a newspaper.

EnderMB 7y ago

I remember when Ghost was released years ago, and I remember thinking "wow, these people have actually gone and released a solid blogging platform to replace the shitshow that is WordPress!". At the time, I was making some decent freelance money from porting botched WordPress builds onto the Umbraco CMS, so my opinion of WP has always been pretty low. Ghost looked like a fantastic publishing tool that was ahead of its time. Obviously, things have changed a lot since then, and to be honest I never really kept much of an eye on Ghost until two people I used to work with started working for Ghost. Now, Ghost is being pushed as a headless CMS, and seems heavily aligned to the JAM stack. From what I've seen and heard, this looks like a fantastic release and you should all be proud of this milestone, and just how far Ghost has come. With that being said, there's a niggling thought in my head that won't go away. What's to stop Ghost from becoming WordPress v2?

johnonolan 7y ago
In theory: Nothing! In reality: The same thing that has prevented that from happening for the last 6 years; a strong focus on a core set of usecases and no desire to become a generic website builder :)

quaffapint 7y ago

Any plans for a multi tenant setup with memberships?

vivin 7y ago

Has the JSON file structure changed in v3? I am trying to migrate from WordPress to Ghost and I was going to use v2, but now that v3 is out, I would like to migrate to v3. (https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/ https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/)

erisds 7y ago
It hasn't changed (see https://ghost.org/docs/api/v3/migration/ https://ghost.org/docs/api/v3/migration/) But also, https://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ https://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/ has been overhauled to export from WP into a format you can import straight into Ghost 3.0.
- vivin 7y ago
  That is awesome -- I was looking to roll my own. This will make it much easier.

eugenekolo 7y ago

Ghost is okay. My blog runs Ghost. I've been using Ghost from about when it was first released, v.09 or something. I am now planning on moving towards something more static and simpler. Ghost started as a simpler alternative to WordPress, but slightly more powerful than Hugo/Jekyll/etc. It now seems to just be a WordPress clone written in JS instead of PHP. It's still fine and works well... but, I can't see a reason to use it versus WordPress and its lost roots to its simplicity. I will probably be migrating to Jekyll for easier self hosting and hacking. Perhaps I'll stick with Ghost... but, I'm starting to become weary of "commercial open source" products. Self hosting is becoming harder and harder... it's in their best interest to make you buy the managed solution. It looks like Ghost has transitioned to a product for media corps, in that sense it looks good and I'd use it. For personal usage, I can't recommend it anymore.

jjjbokma 7y ago
If you like to hack in Python or Perl maybe have a peek at tumblelog [0]? I am currently working on version 4.0.0. and I don't think you can get more static and simpler except for running an older version. You can see it in action here: http://plurrrr.com/ http://plurrrr.com/ [0] https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog https://github.com/john-bokma/tumblelog
blairbeckwith 7y ago
I’m not sure how anyone can say in good faith that Ghost is “just a Wordpress clone”. Even a cursory walkthrough if the dashboard shows this to absolutely not be the case.
jamesgeck0 7y ago
> I will probably be migrating to Jekyll for easier self hosting and hacking. I was thinking of swapping to Hugo, but Ghost 3.0's static site integrations looks it means that I can just run Ghost on my local machine and upload plan HTML to the server. Seems like the best of both worlds.
alexmingoia 7y ago
If you’re looking for a simpler alternative to Ghost for personal blogging, without the hassle of self-hosting, check out https://etch.blog https://etch.blog - it’s bootstrapped, simple, affordable, and free of nonsense.

spraveenitpro 7y ago

Doesn't WordPress already do this?

thesorrow 7y ago

I wonder if taking the JAMStack route won't prevent you to become a real alternative to Medium by making ActivityPub (federation) implementation harder ?

johnonolan 7y ago
Watch this space :)
- thesorrow 7y ago
  If ActivityPub is the next big feature count me in !
  - deleted 7y ago
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benfrain 7y ago

Native comment system yet?

40four 7y ago

Great to see a new major release! I have used Ghost in a couple of projects, and I am always impressed with the functionality & the flexibility to use it how you want. The built in editor and admin panel is great, but the real sweetness comes from the REST API. The ability to integrate into any custom website is fantastic!

fortran77 7y ago

Will the fans of Norton Ghost be complaining, the way the Elm MUA people complain about Elm the programming language? https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx

LeoPanthera 7y ago
I had to scroll down before I realised that this is not the disk imaging tool "Ghost". I've been retired from IT for a few years now - is Ghost (the disk utility) no longer a thing? I couldn't even guess how many hours I spent sitting in front of this screen: https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-ghost.jpg https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-ghost.jpg
- fortran77 7y ago
  Actually, its the first think I think of too. Now I use Acronis True Image (which works very well on Windows and I can recover from a dead boot drive in no time!)

dpeck 7y ago

Congratulations on the release. I like the direction that they're going and it feels like the only thing that it is missing to be able to replace the backend on a LOT of sites is being able to add some type of custom fields (simple key values) to posts. That combined with the subscription/membership they've added here would be an very powerful platform for many uses.

kstrauser 7y ago

I dig Ghost, but there are any number of client apps (like MarsEdit) that play great with WordPress but not at all with Ghost. Are there plugins that let it support a more widely used API so that it works well with those clients?

bbx 7y ago

I've never tried Ghost, although their website always appealed to me (one of the best designed website I know). I've been using WordPress for the past 13 years, for personal and also professional projects, which means the familiarity I've built with building custom themes never drew me towards trying another CMS. But going through this blog post announcement, I saw that Ghost can be used as a headless CMS with frontend frameworks. And since I started using GatsbyJS extensively in the past year, it seems like something that would work _really_ well together. (It turns out that the official website is actually built with GatsbyJS, so the integration is probably really robust.) Gonna try it out! And congrats on remaining true to your initial philosophy.

tjbiddle 7y ago

Congrats! Slightly off-topic question: Is a handful of the Ghost team based in Bali? I know the team is 100% remote and I've noticed multiple laptops with Ghost stickers at my co-working center.

johnonolan 7y ago
Not permanently, but there were quite a few of us in Bali this year (I think 7 at one point) working from Tropical Nomad. Now we've all moved on again!

brianpgordon 7y ago

> The hard part is the publishing platform to integrate with the subscriptions and the billing - that's the part nobody else is doing - and we were getting pretty good at building a flexible, modern publishing platform. Doesn't Medium sort of do this? I get that you can't run your own instance or bill specifically for just your content, but otherwise it seems very similar.

emdowling 7y ago
The two caveats/differences you mentioned are the biggest complaints against Medium. Medium is a fantastic platform for finding an audience when you don’t have one already. It’s an awesome way to just write and get your work out there. As the post mentions, Ghost 3.0 is targeted at people like Ben Thompson (in the extreme case) who have an audience passionate/supportive/large enough to pay them directly and who want to own the entire relationship with no middleman.

tylermenezes 7y ago

The most shocking thing about this post, to me, is that they've only made $5M revenue in 6 years. After expenses, that's got to be a really small profit.

elicash 7y ago
Is this low for open source projects? I mean, I'd imagine it's low compared to WordPress.org -- but compared to other projects of its size this doesn't seem low to me.

antigirl 7y ago

I was the initial backer for Ghost when it was first on kickstarter, i was very excited about the prospect. But after it release i felt quite cheated. The progress was insanely slow, there were a discussion about responsive images on their github which lasted probably months before anything was done about it. It was very limiting still months after its initial release. Naturally i lost interest.

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artpi 7y ago

Fantastic work John! The membership feature looks amazing and I honestly am very impressed by your landing page since I work on something a bit similar :). The Stripe Billing integration sounds exciting, but I am curious about the 0% transaction fees. Stripe usually takes 2.9%+30c on charges and Stripe Billing costs 0.4$ (free for the first $1M so we can ignore that). Did you negotiate some kind of a special deal with Stripe or the 0% means that YOU don't take additional fees, but Stripe fees are still there?

johnonolan 7y ago
You connect your own Stripe account - so whatever fees are there are specific to your setup. They vary widely based on your country, the customer's country, currency and volume. The main difference with Ghost is that there are no additional platform transaction fees - which there usually are with every other product in this space (generally another +5% - +10%. Hope that helps to clarify!