Interesting enough, even John O’Nolan didn’t anticipate the reaction he received when he published a concept page for a light WordPress engine called Ghost – blogging platform.
It seemed interesting to me at that time and my friend Zoran thought it was an awesome idea. What stroked me the most was that the concept page was made of images, like John didn’t want any publicity, it was just an idea in his head that found a way on paper.
Fortunately, it didn’t help him, as Ghost became incredibly viral in just 6 hours. Everybody was cheering and praising it, but I thought that nothing will come out of it, to be honest.
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Kickstarter success
Well, few days ago Ghost came back in my life as I saw a fundraiser for Ghost on Kickstarter . Wow, they hit the target of 25.000 GBP within 12 hours of becoming public and it just kept going and going.
What is Ghost
I am speaking in present tense on purpose, because I strongly believe that Ghost blogging platform is a reality that is coming in just a few months from now.
In my own words, Ghost is filing the gap that WordPress left when it became the best CMS platform in the world. But, Ghost is so much more. John’s vision of Ghost is that you will just blog, no need to mess around and loose precious time, you just take it and start writing.
An open source blogging platform which makes writing pleasurable and publishing simple. It’s simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time messing with making your blog work – and more time blogging.
It brings the awesome idea of split views, where you can immediately see what you write in a real life preview. No need to go anywhere, all tools are just there, available to you, the writer, to write awesome content.
Beautifully designed dashboard already gives the idea of user experience level Ghost blogging platform will bring to it’s users:
It’s mobile optimized, brings no hassle editing and real life preview, adding tags and categories in an really easy way, drag and drop images directly to the place you want them to be, sharing and SEO ready and much more.
Ghost blogging platform is:
- Ghost is built for users
- Ghost is free
- Ghost is made for love, not profit
and those are it’s three major principles.
Sounds awesome!
Technology
Ghost blogging platform prototype is written in Node.js, claiming that JavaScript server side is growing rapidly and that by utilizing JavaScript, people in technologies can participate (Ruby on Rails or Python).
It sounds great, but I have some concerns. Is Node.js a technology widely present in shared hosting environments? Will it be in the future?
Ghost team announced their cloud based solution similar to WordPress.com, but i am more interested in seeing Ghost work as standalone platform. I hope that Ghost will certainly add to Node.js popularity.
As for the database, Ghost ships with SqlLite, but will be able to work on many database engines as it is using great JugglingDB ORM fofr Node.js.
They say that Ghost will be easily pluggable, just like WordPress is.
Ghost themes
Ghost themes will be written in Handlebars, a JavaScript templating engine and it looks damn similar of how WordPress themes were made (to me at least).
When I saw that WooThemes and Envato founded Ghost and became it’s partners, I was so excited that I jumped. No, really, new blogging platform without theme marketplace can not survive for long. Theme marketplaces are the motivator that allow plethora of theme developer to earn for the living.
If those developers start doing great themes for Ghost blogging platform, it will surely make bloggers use it.
Why Ghost?
Well, people that are behind Ghost worked on WordPress platform for 6-7 years, John was involved as a Deputy Head of the WordPress UI Group. He directly mad WordPress interface this great (along with others in teem).
So they know what they want, why they want it and how they want it. I am certain that Ghost will surely bring a fresh point of view for the world of blogging.
I backed Ghost on Kickstarter, I think you should, too!
I am very excited to see how Ghost will change the blogging for better and you? I would like to hear your opinion in comments below.
I kinda regret not participating in the KS for Ghost. The only reason I would have done it is to get early access. I so want to abandon WP in favor of something new – yes, I know how lame that sounds.
I’d like to see your new GhostBlog when it launches
i just set up a new blog using Ghost, and while it’s not done test (version 0.3) it’s quite easy to use and very fun.
I liked it a lot, I will use along WP
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