Hey Producthunt! It's been a while :) We're back with our biggest ever update to Ghost, 4 years after our original launch on Kickstarter. We spent the last ~9 months and 2,600+ commits on this release (prizes if you can guess how long we originally predicted it was going to take) and it's absolutely full of improvements.
The biggest change by far is a move to a dynamic block-based editor in built on MobileDoc (An open document storage format based on JSON) in collaboration with Bustle.com - we're really excited about where that's going. In short: It paves the way toward a rich editing experience (Like Medium) but with powerful, dynamic blocks of content (Like Slack/Notion).
There's still a long way to go in realising the full vision for the new writing experience, but Ghost 1.0 represents a huge step in that direction - along with a plethora of improvements in both design and code architecture. The main release post is linked above, but we also have a dev blog post about all the underlying API improvements here: https://dev.ghost.org/ghost-1-0-0/
Would love to hear your thoughts! We'll be doing a little podcast this week on the release, so if you have any questions we'll likely answer them IRL :)
@johnonolan Hi John! Sick release.
You recently mentioned you want to focus more (or extra) on helping businesses with their blog platforms. Can you tell more about your plans? Will you add any functipnality (or is it in her?) specifically?
@levelsio Hey Pietz! Absolutely. That's what's next from a feature standpoint. Back in January we announced a journalism program (https://ghost.org/journalism) where we selected 3 publishers to work with and design business based features around their needs. That work is well underway, and we're excited about a lot of things on that front.
But you wanted specifics: The main functionality we're really interested in incorporating into Ghost is that of memberships and subscriptions. Modern journalism needs a business model, and @theinformation + @benthompson's Stratechery are paving the way for what looks like a sustainable, positive economic model for digital news. Can we make that easily accessible to everyone? That's what we'd like to find out!
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@johnonolan Pumped about this release. Been checking the dev blog all week wondering if it was coming. Looking forward to giving it a go. Good work!
@johnonolan A fan here. I love the product and love companies that combine open source with making money. What about future elements like subscriptions, will they be part of the open source version too?
@erwblo "It depends" - things get complicated when you start talking about payments and centralised vs decentralised - but generally speaking whenever something is possible to do open-and-deceentralised, that's the route we take.
In all honesty, that route has been incredibly painful at times because decentralised software is just so much harder to release than a traditional multi-tenant app, making iteration and development slower. When it comes to subscriptions, there are still too many variables to have a definitive answer. Personally: I'd like 100% of it to be decentral and open. In practice, it might end up being 90% open source and 10% a hosted service to tie the pieces together. This is something we're still figuring out :)
@andreyazimov Thanks Andrey! 🤗 It's been a long time coming
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Congrats @hannah_wolfe@johnonolan and team! I have been following the development of Ghost since almost the start, can't wait to use it on my next project 😎
Congrats! The new backend and standard theme look really clean and beautiful!
One issue I had with ghost in the past is that there seems to be no support for multilingual websites (i.e. like the qTranslate Wordpress plugin). Therefore I never really tried out ghost for my projects. Are you planning to release an multi-language blogs in the near future?
@josef_moser Planning? Yes. Near future? Unlikely. We've had an open call for contributions for i18n support for 2+ years, but it has always really struggled to gain any traction. We do have a few i18n improvements coming up, but full support is still a way off I'm afraid. Hope this changes though :)
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@josef_moser I work in a bilingual speaking business who need multilingual blogging platform. I wanted to suggest Ghost because other platform sucks, but the impossibility to blog in both languages (French & English) was sadly a big deal. If there is any way to help on i18n to accelerate a release of a version that will support a multilingual version, i'd be happy to participate as much as I can.
Also, is there any way to plug GHOSt with Hubspot?
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Awesome job @johnonolan and team. I've been testing the releases on a dev server until now. Now it's time to move this baby into production. :)
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I've been using Ghost for three years now and have really enjoyed the experience. Very excited to see the enhancements to the editor which I have thought needed some upgrades for awhile.
Can't wait for the upgrade to roll out to my Ghost Pro account.
@wesleylivesay Thanks so much for the support Wesley :) I'll make sure we get you into one of the first batches to get the Ghost(Pro) upgrade rollout. That link should be fixed now too!
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