WordPress is worlds most popular CMS. Currently WordPress powers 20% websites on the planet it means every 5th websites is using WordPress as their core platform. WordPress started as a blogging tool to fulfill the needs of a blogging platform & now it has become worlds most popular CMS. You can use it freely and its up to you how you create powerful and great websites with WordPress.
You can create apps with WordPress. Over 27000+ plugs and 2000+ themes are available at WordPress.org for download. That makes WordPress very powerful and popular. With free and premium plugins even beginners user can create different type of websites with in minutes/hours easily.
People from WordPress also knows that, WordPress is much more than a blogging platform, here what Matt Mullenweg & lance Willett says about WordPress:
“66% of [Users] said they use WordPress as a CMS and not as a blog.”
– Matt Mullenweg, co-founder of WordPress / State of The Word 2012
“Recently, it’s become even more evident that WordPress is heavily used as a content management system (CMS) with many more sites now using it to organize any kind of content rather than purely as a blog.”
– Lance Willett, creator of the “Twenty Twelve” default WordPress theme – which changes the default WordPress install home page for the first time to a static website home page, not a blog.
You can start a basic blog, create a social networking website with buddypress, create a online discussion forum or create an eCommerce websites, it’s not a problem. when WordPress has all these and so many features and benefits why you need to say Good bye WordPress. Because WordPress is no more a blogging tool and it has so many features that’s not necessary for a basic blogging tool.
Try Ghost: Just a Blogging Platform
Now we have a great new blogging platform. Ghost: just a blogging platform. That is simple in every way and focus on publishing. It was the idea of John O’Nolan he dream of a simple publishing platform and posted his idea and people on the internet supported his idea. His post created a buzz and got quarter of a million page views and positive feedback. After 29 days on Kickstarter ghost raised $300,000. That was a clear sign of how eager were people for a simple publishing platform. Envato and other many companies were partnered to back Ghost. Now Ghost is available to the public. If you want to try Ghost go visit Ghost website, sign up for an account, and download the latest version.
Ghost Features
Revolutionary Dashboard
Dashboard is where you manage your site and create great content. Ghost promise for simple and useful Dashboard that you would like to use. You will be able to see traffic details. top content, social media stats. Dashboard will be customizable with drag & drop widgets.
Currently Ghost has a very simple Dashboard, which offers Content, New Post and Settings screen. in content screen you can see all post with live preview. Here you can see Content screen in dashboard.
Here is preview of Settings screen, You can change blog name, add description, add blog cover and see how many post do you want to show on your home page.
Split-View writing Screen
Ghost is made for publishing. So writing screen must be great & Ghost has a simple and great writing screen . Ghost uses split view feature. With Ghost you can start writing on the left in Markdown and see live updating preview of your post on right side. Adding images to your post is very simple with drag & drop feature.
Fully responsive
Ghost is a fully responsive blogging platform. It works on every device, It means you can use it on PC, tablet or your iPhone or Android easily. Ghost has a fully responsive front end and dashboard.
Themes
Design is important for any websites & Ghost team knows that. You can create your own themes. Ghost themes are intended to be simple to build and maintain. Ghost uses Handlebars that is a templating language. If you want to create your own themes for Ghost don’t forget to read the handlebars documentation.
No integrated Commenting system
Ghost does not have integrated commenting system. Ghost plans to have very simple integration with companies who build sophisticated commenting platforms for a living. Like Disqus. I thinks this is another cool idea. You won’t have to worry about spam comments (I hate spam comments in WordPress). Many popular websites started using Disqus. Such as Tuts Plus Network.
Plugins
Every blogging site has some must have plugins for features like SEO, Related Posts, Google Analytics, Twitter/Facebook/Instagram integration, Inline Spelling and Grammar checks, Contact Forms, Numbered Pagination, Backups. Ghost will add some most important features directly to core. Ghost has plans to treat third party developers as their partners.
How to install Ghost?
Ghost is Node.Js based blogging platform. So you won’t be able to run on your shared hosting. There is a good news you ghost team was working with many companies to make Ghost up and running as easy as possible. So now here are some option to run your Ghost blog.
HostGhost.io – Ghost Blog Platform Hosting
Ghost team has set up a hosted platform for Ghost which allows you to set up and run a Ghost blog with just a couple of clicks of your mouse. You will be able to use a custom domain name for your Ghost blog at hostghost.io
Auto installers for Ghost
Auto installers are very popular now a days. Auto installers make it very simple & easy to install popular CMS’s. With auto installers you can run popular CMS’s on your local PC & on your live web servers. Some companies offers auto installer for Ghost.
Bitnami is well known for its auto installers & yes bitnami has an auto installer for ghost too. You can download Bitnami Ghost installer for Windows, OS X & Linux. Bitnami also offers Ghost for Virtual Machine .
You can also Run your own Ghost server in the cloud with bitnami’s hosting platform or using a pre-built image for Amazon, Azure and other providers.
Digital Ocean offers Ghost Droplet, which allows you to deploy a live Ghost blog quickly . Check out the Digital Ocean Droplet to get started.
Rackspace one of the largest enterprise hosting company, has a Image which automatically configures and deploys a new Ghost install. you can download and install Ghost manually on your MAC, PC or live server. Visit Rackspace Ghost Deployment to get started.
you can also download and install Ghost manually in order to use it. Ghost is world’s first blogging platform, that is built with javascript (Node.js). Manual installation is a little bit complicated & may be confusing for beginners. In order to install Ghost locally you will have to install Node.js on your Mac or Windows.
You can read the installation doc to learn how you can install Ghost on your Mac, Windows, Linux or Web server.
So what do you think about the future of this new blogging platform. share your views in comments.
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Charlie Oct 29, 2013, 3:53 pm
“when WordPress has all these and so many features and benefits why you need to say Good bye WordPress. Because WordPress is no more a blogging tool and it has so many features that’s not necessary for a basic blogging tool.”
WordPress offers most of this functionality as plugins. The base WordPress is still a (simple) blogging tool. I like simpler – but the point above doesn’t explain why go “Bye Bye”. Furthermore, all of the Ghost features (responsive design, etc.) are already part of WP.
Tahir Taous Oct 30, 2013, 1:01 am
Even with default WordPress installation there are so many features, that may confuse beginners and difficult for novice users. As a beginner you will have to learn & undertand WordPress, that’s why sites lie wp101 & lynda have WordPress Essential training courses for beginners.
But to use Ghost you won’t have spend a single penny, even a novice user can publish posts with in few minutes from any device like PC, Tablet, iPhone or Android.
No need to change permalink structure, add SEO plugins, use responsive themes, install iOS & Android apps to use it on mobile.
People wanted a simple blogging platform, that’s why they supported the idea of Ghost. Ghost collcted $30.0000 in 29 days on KickStarter & WordPress is not a simple blogging platform, not even with its default installation. That’s why we should say Bye Bye WordPress as a Blogging platform and use it as a CMS as 66% users said thay use it WordPress as a CMS.
Beth Oct 30, 2013, 7:10 pm
Tahir, I definitely think there is a great space for people interested only in blogging, and to have a service that makes that possible is a bonus.
I think your post is not aimed at taking down WordPress but at sharing with the simple bloggers of the world that they can now go even more simple with a blogging-only platform. I do not only want to blog, I want to serve people, for that reason this whole concept doesn’t really appeal to me, but I think it does to other people.
I also like Medium, it has some great ways to interact and share short sweet blog posts.
With all these platforms catering to very specific needs I think it’s a great time to pick up a new hobby :)
WordPress is still free, but it has extended beyond just posting blog posts, simply because it’s users needed it to create more engagement and connecting. It was born out of the needs of the users, as was this Ghost platform. :)
Tahir Taous Nov 6, 2013, 10:55 am
yes Beth i am not saying WordPress is bad, i just want to say Ghost is much better than WordPress as a simple bloggng tool.
René Nov 5, 2013, 3:10 pm
We build nearly all our customers websites with WordPress and most of our customers are beginners. Cannot agree about the point, that it is difficult for them to start diving into WordPress. It’s easy as hell, even when we start building in a lot of CMS features and plugins. They never have a lot of problems. It takes us only 5 minutes to explain where they edit their content and the WYSIWYG is the easiest (would not say the best) tool for them.
I’m not sure the markdown writing split view of Ghost makes it easier.
Tahir Taous Nov 6, 2013, 10:58 am
Ok Rene. Don’t you think Ghost is much simpler and asy to use if we compare it with WordPress.
Chris Southam Nov 5, 2013, 12:36 pm
I published my thoughts on the Ghost platform last week here: http://www.csoutham.com/ghost-publishing-not-made-simpler
Anyone seen that fancy dashboard yet?!
Ciaran Whelan Nov 5, 2013, 12:50 pm
Ghost is OK… clean and intuitive yes. However how many times will you write a blog post and keep it categorised with a sidebar so your users can look through your category for your blog/news posts? Many times users will look at the ease of navigation to your posts. This is not a basic feature built into Ghost, and until something like this is done it is useless for navigation of your posts. Tags do not count since you cannot make navigation of tags in Ghost.
Tahir Taous Nov 6, 2013, 11:11 am
Ciaran don’t you think Ghost is a new platform & we should wait to see more improvements.
David Nov 5, 2013, 3:54 pm
Yet another platform that tries to make things so simple. But why do we need another platform when cms solutions such as Joomla WordPress are very easy to understand and with 1000’s of free tutorials if you get stuck.
Are we just getting sucked in to another system that will eventually charge for plugins and add ons. I don’t like the idea of sharing platform being integrated in the core of the site.
If this platform is to launch it needs to work on shared servers as many of our customers could not afford to hire a server to themselves.
Although I will be watching the progress of this and may consider creating an auto install for whmcs auto pilot if it turns to be as popular as many other cms solutions but I am not holding my breath.
Tahir Taous Nov 6, 2013, 11:17 am
I agree David, Ghost is based on Node.Js and shared hosting is very popular. simplicity is great but Ghost team should have used some other popular & widely used language such as PHP as their core language. Some of worlds most popular and widely used CMS WordPress, Joomla, Drupal & even Facebook is built with PHP.
Demigod Nov 5, 2013, 8:00 pm
Well, I tried Ghost, and first thing that bothers me is painful installation process, I think it’s not a good way for starting something witch promises simplicity as one of the key factors.
On the other hand there are some good thing about it, like live preview of post and ease of creating content, but it rather looks like a fail in advance to me…
Scott Nov 6, 2013, 8:25 pm
I’m pretty in the dark on Ghost as this is the second post I’ve read on it, but anyone needing a blog they can jump into and easily post an article instantly without learning anything will not be able to handle a blog that needs dedicated hosting – its like the simplicity is being offset to make something harder somewhere else, and even if there is a control panel installation, a simple blogger won’t want to handle the cost of dedicated hosting… I host just shy of 100 businesses on shared hosting, and some fairly large. Personally I couldn’t stomach the cost of a dedicated host for a simple blog, but maybe I don’t know all the costs of every dedicated host… I like my host and don’t go very far :)