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).<p>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:<p>- 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.<p>- 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.<p>- 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<p>"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.<p>Also: Something about Postgres<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>What's to stop Ghost from becoming WordPress v2?
In my experience, Ghost has been the no-nonsense blog CMS that has been stable and just worked with very little maintenance.<p>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.
Ghost is okay. My blog runs Ghost. I've been using Ghost from about when it was first released, v.09 or something.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>This, from my experience as a developer and ops engineer for a newspaper.
looks nice. Especially like the membership module and will definitely look more deeply into integration with nuxt.js (wow).<p>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:<p><a href="https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0b90f47cd908161171bb40/packages/members-api" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0...</a><p>Are there any plans for that? Do you think it is easy to integrate other payment providers in future?<p>UPDATE: ok, I've seen your website FAQ <a href="https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-providers" rel="nofollow">https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-...</a> I will not support a one payment gateway blog membersite. Sorry Ghost.<p>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.
Serious question.<p>In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.".<p>But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business.<p>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?<p>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.
Will the fans of Norton Ghost be complaining, the way the Elm MUA people complain about Elm the programming language?<p><a href="https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx" rel="nofollow">https://www.symantec-norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx</a>
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.<p>> But you probably want to know about the $5M thing.<p>No, I'd rather know about what Ghost is :P
Congrats!<p>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.
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.
> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>(<a href="https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/" rel="nofollow">https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/</a>)
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.<p>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.<p>(It turns out that the official website is actually built with GatsbyJS, so the integration is probably really robust.)<p>Gonna try it out! And congrats on remaining true to your initial philosophy.
Looks great, the payments integration is a great idea.<p>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 $348/year.<p>Having paid subscriptions built-in makes that easier to swallow. I don't want any 3rd party ad networks on my site, so subscriptions could help offset the high costs.<p>Wouldn't help me personally since my site isn't very active and wouldn't get subscribers, but I imagine this will work for some other folks.
I dig Ghost, but there are any number of client apps (like MarsEdit) that play great with WordPress but not at all with Ghost. Are there plugins that let it support a more widely used API so that it works well with those clients?
Fantastic work John!<p>The membership feature looks amazing and I honestly am very impressed by your landing page since I work on something a bit similar :).<p>The Stripe Billing integration sounds exciting, but I am curious about the 0% transaction fees.
Stripe usually takes 2.9%+30c on charges and Stripe Billing costs 0.4$ (free for the first $1M so we can ignore that).<p>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?
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.
I wonder if taking the JAMStack route won't prevent you to become a real alternative to Medium by making ActivityPub (federation) implementation harder ?
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.
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.<p>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!