This post originally was featured on Blog Awesome. The author Zach is a web developer who writes in his free time, you can follow him on Twitter or view his not-always-up-to-date-because-he’s-so-busy personal site at procoder.io.
Ghost is a new blogging platform that came out a few months ago. What’s unique about it is that it runs on node.js, which for you non-programmers out there is a different language than what most sites use currently (WordPress uses PHP). It’s a nice little platform, and reminds me of Medium, a distraction-free website that lets you write and share anything. If you haven’t used it, it sounds like tumblr, but it’s much more… intellectual than that. Ghost feels like a self-hosted version of Medium in someways.
WordPress is not a small blogging platform at all, compared to the current state of Ghost. At this time it’s just too hard for the average person to use ghost, and too expensive to use the hosted option on the official site. I like the idea of Ghost for personal blogs, because it’s fast and simple. But that’s also the problem. It’s too simple right now to justify moving WordPress sites over to it. Even though it does take away all of the hassle and setup that goes along with setting up WordPress sites. There’s just not enough functionality other than adding posts.
Ghost has a marketplace where you can find themes, but it’s very small right now. There’s a lot to like if you’re wanting totry using the platform, but I’m not the only one who sees problems. Another blogger over at Ovirium found these challenges as well.
- no ability to create any settings for a theme; unfortunately, because of the trend of having tons of options 99% of themes (for WordPress though) does have options, giving users more flexibility;
- no ability to have some custom functions (used PHP terminology, or helpers from Handlebars.js) – you are stuck with the default ones from Handlebars or Ghost;
- no API for creating plugins so far
Without an official api and documentation for creating plugins, ghost can’t compete with WordPress. Once plugins are made and more people make themes for the service, I think it will start to gain traction. Will Ghost move in and take some of the marketshare from WordPress? I guess we’ll have to wait and see how it grows.
If you’ve ever used Ghost, I’d like to hear about your experience in the comments!