Ghost 2.0

👋 Hey Product Hunters! This is the 3rd major iteration (the first was 0) of the Ghost open source publishing platform. There’s a blog post linked above which talks about everything new and shiny included in this release, but I thought I’d share a bit more of the product story here for people who are interested in how the sausage gets made (can’t believe there’s no sausage emoji tbh) 👻 The Backstory Ghost launched in 2013 on Kickstarter as a new take on the traditional blogging platform. The difference: Deeply focused on publishing (rather than generic website-building), blazing fast modern codebase, fully open source permissive MIT license, with a sustainable business model, structured as an independent non-profit organisation. To date, there’s still not a single other platform which offers all those things in one place! 🚀 Now We've done about 200 releases, several million downloads, seen 500,000 sites running on Ghost (Including Apple, Tinder, DuckDuckGo, Mozilla, OpenAI and many more) — and the software has matured a long way since the early the days. v2.0 is quite a departure, in many ways, from some of the initial principles which we started out with. The way we make product decisions has definitely evolved 👇🏼 I mentioned in our 5 year anniversary post - https://blog.ghost.org/5/ - that one of the biggest lessons we’ve learned over time is that open/decentralised products fundamentally compete on power and flexibility, rather than outright simplicity. So while Ghost started out as an attempt to be as simple as possible, 2018 for us has been all about opening things up with more power. We’re moving away from “markdown-only” and “a single stream of posts -only” as the way to write and read posts in Ghost - in two major ways: ✍️ We’ve shipped a rich, extensible editor which you could loosely think of as “Medium meets Slack-Integrations, built on an open document storage format” — the likes of which exists nowhere else in open source. 🏠 And we’re enabling full site-structure control, meaning entirely new architectures, formats and collections of content are possible. Use whatever custom homepages, subdirectories, or route structures you want. All of this represents a very conscious move to stay true Ghost’s core focus of publishing but make it more suitable to professional users who need more than just simple blogging :) 📢 Will be hanging around here all day if anyone has any questions

Congrats! How do you see the future of journalism/publishing and the role of Ghost in that? You seem to have moved from being "a lightweight Wordpress" years ago to having a much bigger mission now. I think you've mentioned becoming a platform for paid publishing: where journalists and writers can self-host (or through you) and accept Patreon-style subscriptions. Is that what's next?

I’m speechless. The execution is A1+. Thanks for sharing such a great software 💪👏.

Congrats Ghost team!! Happy user for years here, and can't wait to dig into the new extensible editor of yours (could come in handy for our team ). Out of curiosity, why Slate, Draft or other js OSS editors were not good enough for you? Keep up the great work!

Custom routing! I was actually just thinking about this last night and whether it's possible or not. Perfect timing. Excited to play around with it. Cheers John!