

Ask HN: Which platform do you prefer and why, Ghost or Pelican? - milkers

I am going to move my blog and want to start with something more fresh. If you had made that choice before I want to hear your story.
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agentultra
I have blogs using both!

I went with Pelican before ghost came out to get off of Wordpress. I was tired
of the constant security updates enough to try and migrate to something else.
My first requirement was that it was able to import Wordpress content which
Pelican had.

However, Pelican's wordpress importer was "bare-bones" to say the least and
still is. I fixed it so that it at least preserves formatting (by translating
Wordpress' insane parser thing for its own post format line by line). It won't
preserve things like image links and stuff (or at least I didn't get to that
part).

I'm still not a huge fan of it one way or the other but it does its job I
guess. Development is fast and furious though and I haven't updated in
forever. So ymmv there.

As for Ghost... same problems as Wordpress and harder to self-host by orders
of magnitude. It has a catchy admin interface. Designers love this platform so
finding a good template is pretty easy compared to Pelican (I had to write my
own... again not as much fun as it sounds).

The bonus of both platforms is that they both parse markdown for post content
so dipping your toes in and trying something else shouldn't be too painful.

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chc
Ghost has the same problems as WordPress? That's extremely hard to believe,
since there is no way that Ghost is made out of ancient, often questionable
PHP code that you have to interact with to get anything significant done.

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agentultra
I meant the specific problems _I_ was having with Wordpress: hosted, dynamic
pages and constant upgrades. As Ghost gains popularity it will just become
another target for spammers and will require constant vigilance to protect
your blog if you're self-hosting.

 _Update_ : fixed an unclear anaphora.

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akg_67
Recently, I started using Ghost as personal note journal on my Mac. I reviewed
several non-Wordpress self-hosted platforms and finally decided to test Ghost.
Ghost was easy to setup, there are a few free good themes that you can use or
create/ customize your own. I really like the markdown editor. It allows you
to use markdown as well as HTML. Most of the time I use the editor to write my
notes. Sometime I will use Mou to write, export to HTML and paste in the
markdown editor. I believe Ghost platform is growing and has momentum so
hopefully it will have more features like scheduled posts, tagging, comments
etc.

I also run a web service on a LAMP stack. Initially I thought about using
Ghost for blogging but due to complexity and lack of information on running
Apache with SSL and Nodejs on same server decided to wait.

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ElongatedTowel
Ghost is nice, but it doesn't quite fill the same niche. Its ease of use comes
from its dynamic parts like the editor. Certainly can't use those if I only
want static output without some steps inbetween and especially not if the
server doesn't run any interpreter.

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MehdiEG
I hadn't actually heard of Pelican until now but it looks like Ghost and
Pelican aren't really comparable - they're two very different approaches to a
blogging platform. Pelican looks more comparable to Jekyll.

Personally I've just moved to Ghost and I have to say that I love it. I wrote
a longish post [1] on all the blogging platforms I've tried and how Ghost
compares. The post also explains why I didn't go with something like Jekyll.
Check it out, it might help.

[1] [http://mehdi.me/ghost-io-the-first-blogging-platform-that-
ma...](http://mehdi.me/ghost-io-the-first-blogging-platform-that-makes-me-
happy/)

