Ghost isn’t trying to become WordPress (Response to Zach)
This article is a reply to the post written on Blog Awesome by Zach.
Zach wrote about how Ghost is the newest blogging platform on the block, and it made waves with its Kickstarter campaign. However, Zach claimed that Ghost may try to compete with WordPress in some way. This I believe is something that goes against what Ghost is and what WordPress is attempting to do. WordPress has a goal to be not only a simple blogging platform but also be the worlds most powerful CMS. Were as Ghost wants to be a simple blogging CMS where you can use markdown to craft your post.
The lack of plugins is so that Ghost won’t become a over complicated platform where users could have used WordPress in the first place. The main draw is that Ghost is a simple way to set up a blog and have it beautifully designed, and I know there are not a lot of themes yet but I’ve seen dozens of developers working on some.
I currently use Ghost which gave me the perspective and understanding what Ghost is attempting to do. The theme installs require you to go in and change a little code. This is not for the noob users who may use WordPress, Ghost is appealing to the user who knows there way around a little code and around sites like GitHub. Ghost is drawing more users from Tumblr or Anchor CMS then WordPress like Zach believes right now.
Zach I think the simple draws people over because really on a personal site most people give little time to it while they work on their big projects. They want to go to their personal site and start writing instead of setting things up, managing plugins, and trying to set everything up perfectly. I see that Zach still uses WordPress, but the reason he uses it is not because of the blog functionally but for the ability beyond the simple blog.
Today, a blog is more then just a list of long articles. The blog features more pages with advance features to keep readers on the site long after they’ve read everything. Ghost wants readers to hit the articles they want and leave, they are not worried about ad money or bounce rates. They care about the writing and that’s it.