7 Things I like about Ghost

Having used every version of Ghost since Version 1.0, I think this version of Ghost has to be my favourite. I love how uncluttered it is. If you compare it to WordPress for example, everything is so much cleaner and the steps it takes to do simple things is much less!

There's a couple of really small nit-pick things that I may even fix myself and submit a Pull Request, such as the members count being inconsistent if you add yourself as a test member and the little lightbulb in call-out boxes being too close to the text on mobile, but overall, I still maintain that Ghost is the best platform for blogs.

With that said, here are 7 things I like about the Ghost platform!

Cost Effective

Both WordPress and Ghost are free, and I've ran websites on both platforms. Ghost, however, wins in that you can host it on the cheapest Digital Ocean droplet available ($6/month) and it works a treat.

With WordPress, you often get errors about being unable to connect to the database and a lot of folks online, especially on Digital Ocean support say this could be down to the amount of resource the droplet has available and you should bump it up to the next tier.

Post Cards

Ghost makes it super easy to embed extra content into posts such as an image gallery, call out cards, toggle content, membership only content etc... It's done in such an elegant and straightforward way. For example, here's what an image gallery looks like:

I can select up to 9 images to show in a fancy grid on the post. Ghost handles all of the image resizing so they all fit well with each other.

I can also easily embed content from Youtube, Twitter, Spotify, Vimeo and many other services.

Theme Management

Ghost allows you to switch out themes for you site really easily and this is something they improved upon as part of Ghost 4.0. Previously it involved download and uploading zip files into the Ghost Admin however there's now a dedicated theme section which allows you to "preview" a theme before installing it automatically, right in the Ghost Admin.

I actually took a stab at building my own Ghost theme which you can check out on Github. This was done years ago though and I'm not even sure it's installable on newer versions of Ghost. I did submit it to the theme directory but unfortunately it wasn't approved 😭

Easy to Understand UI

Ghost has a really simple UI, like, incredibly simple. Everything you see has a purpose and there's no screen or menu that feels too cluttered. Everything is really easy to find.

I'm currently running dark mode, but light mode is just as nice 😎

Constantly Updated

Ghost is Open Source, which is one of the reasons I love it. Anyone in the world can contribute to this incredible platform, if they can think of something that benefits them, maybe it'll benefit thousands of other people using Ghost too?

Ghost is constantly being updated with new features, both big and small to increase what the platform can do. They have a public facing Changelog so you can see just how often they ship updates and improvements.

Last year for Christmas, they announced Cardmas. Cardmas was a month long event that ran in December, that announced 12 new cards for the Ghost platform. Thanks to Cardmas, it's easy for a user to embed content into their posts, in just a couple of clicks.

I could go on, but this post would end up being way to long so I'll stop at 5 things!

If you're thinking about starting a new blog or you want to refresh an existing blog, please give Ghost a go, you won't look back.