
Ghost 3.0 - sareiodata
https://ghost.org/blog/3-0/
======
johnonolan
Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a
lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a
platform (which is now 6 years old).

I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and
reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few
more relevant details absent from the marketing copy:

\- The new membership system is effectively just an email database with JWT
based authentication. Two cool things about this: You can import any CSV of
emails and that's now a user database of people who can log in, and 2: not
storing passwords at all is pretty great.

\- New billing features are a deep integration w/ Stripe Billing API, which
works with your API keys, not via Stripe Connect, so there's no middleman.
Ghost can't add any fees on transactions, and volume doesn't flow through our
Stripe account in any way - so it remains completely decentralised without a
bottleneck. The significant part of that is: If Ghost the company were to ever
go away, your site/billing/everything would keep working as normal. Doesn't
depend on us.

\- All our APIs and Webhooks have been continually improved to the point where
Ghost is now the most popular (at least by Github stars, the fruit of life)
open source headless CMS out there. Also a new Github Action for CI/CD of
Ghost themes makes that whole process a lot less painful

"What's the point of this, why not just use [x]" Because [x] is some
combination of: closed source, centralised, written in decade old procedural
PHP, or has some sort of UI which no non-developer wants to go anywhere near.
We try to sit at the juncture of these things with a decentralised product,
easy to run with a managed service, built with tech developers don't hate, and
a UI that people who create content really love.

Also: Something about Postgres

On a serious note, thanks for all the support. Ghost launched on HN and it was
that initial boost that got everything started. I'll be hanging out in the
comments here throughout the day.

~~~
mkr-hn
Do you have any plans to offer a solo professional type plan? ~$350/year and
up is quite a lot more than I can justify for what I would use this for.
Something like Automattic's Premium plan ($8/month) for a managed blog with a
subscription system like this would be an easy sell for me.

I understand if that's a hard no. You seem to be aiming at people who are or
plan to be big time enough to hire people to help. Getting people in who might
head that way so they have an easy upgrade path might be good though. If I
were the kind of person Patreon's top plan aims at, any Ghost plan would be an
easy sell, but even thinking about that is a long way off for me.

~~~
sdan
Self host it if you can. I do at
[https://sdan.xyz/blog](https://sdan.xyz/blog) and
[https://sdan.xyz/essays](https://sdan.xyz/essays) and it works flawlessly
regardless of visitors/staff members/etc.

Obviously by paying Ghost to host it for you is a bit pricey since they have
to make a profit as well, but the amazing thing is that the whole thing is
open sourced for people like us to self host (I wrote a post about how I self
host a bunch of stuff including ghost:
[http://sdan.xyz/sd2](http://sdan.xyz/sd2))

~~~
mkr-hn
I'd rather pay them to do it. The last time I self-hosted, it was WordPress,
and the temptation to tinker was too great and distracted from the actual goal
of having a blog.

~~~
jhymn
Then why not Svbtle or Write.as? You have lots of affordable or even free
choices.

~~~
mkr-hn
The subscription system, as I mentioned upthread. Making a blog is easy.
Making a blog with pay gated access to posts and downloads is not. The closest
equivalent is Patreon + WordPress with the Patreon plugin. I already mentioned
the issue with self-hosted WordPress. Managed solutions cost more than Ghost
and provide less.

~~~
tyre
Sounds like a good business opportunity if someone's looking for it.

call it gHosting

~~~
sdan
Sounds like an interesting idea... selling software under the MIT license
which the software holder is maintaining...

Looks like I have a weekend project now!

~~~
setr
This complaint has never made sense to me; you're selling software/hardware
management, not the software itself.

And this is precisely the pain point of the gp... This isn't just reasonable,
it's utterly sensible.

~~~
mkr-hn
Yep. I don't mind Ghost or Automattic charging so much for managed hosting.
That _also_ pays for development. I don't want to assume other managed hosts
charging more for WordPress without doing anything more is just greed, but it
has the look.

That's why I want Ghost to offer a lower tier. That way I could get started at
a price I can afford where I'm at, support the development of Ghost, and have
an easy upgrade path if I need it. It's the curve, not the price, that I don't
like.

------
EnderMB
I remember when Ghost was released years ago, and I remember thinking "wow,
these people have actually gone and released a solid blogging platform to
replace the shitshow that is WordPress!". At the time, I was making some
decent freelance money from porting botched WordPress builds onto the Umbraco
CMS, so my opinion of WP has always been pretty low. Ghost looked like a
fantastic publishing tool that was ahead of its time.

Obviously, things have changed a lot since then, and to be honest I never
really kept much of an eye on Ghost until two people I used to work with
started working for Ghost. Now, Ghost is being pushed as a headless CMS, and
seems heavily aligned to the JAM stack.

From what I've seen and heard, this looks like a fantastic release and you
should all be proud of this milestone, and just how far Ghost has come. With
that being said, there's a niggling thought in my head that won't go away.

What's to stop Ghost from becoming WordPress v2?

~~~
johnonolan
In theory: Nothing!

In reality: The same thing that has prevented that from happening for the last
6 years; a strong focus on a core set of usecases and no desire to become a
generic website builder :)

------
praveenweb
In my experience, Ghost has been the no-nonsense blog CMS that has been stable
and just worked with very little maintenance.

I like that they are now moving towards static site JAMStack approach, driven
by APIs rather than the current SSR model. This lets anybody to customise
their themes with the language / framework of choice and generating static
builds that can be cached for improved loading times.

------
eugenekolo
Ghost is okay. My blog runs Ghost. I've been using Ghost from about when it
was first released, v.09 or something.

I am now planning on moving towards something more static and simpler. Ghost
started as a simpler alternative to WordPress, but slightly more powerful than
Hugo/Jekyll/etc. It now seems to just be a WordPress clone written in JS
instead of PHP. It's still fine and works well... but, I can't see a reason to
use it versus WordPress and its lost roots to its simplicity.

I will probably be migrating to Jekyll for easier self hosting and hacking.
Perhaps I'll stick with Ghost... but, I'm starting to become weary of
"commercial open source" products. Self hosting is becoming harder and
harder... it's in their best interest to make you buy the managed solution. It
looks like Ghost has transitioned to a product for media corps, in that sense
it looks good and I'd use it. For personal usage, I can't recommend it
anymore.

~~~
blairbeckwith
I’m not sure how anyone can say in good faith that Ghost is “just a Wordpress
clone”. Even a cursory walkthrough if the dashboard shows this to absolutely
not be the case.

------
bovermyer
This is definitely targeted squarely at the publishing industry. Newspapers
that have yet to build their own CMS should seriously consider using this to
power their digital presence.

This, from my experience as a developer and ops engineer for a newspaper.

------
therealmarv
looks nice. Especially like the membership module and will definitely look
more deeply into integration with nuxt.js (wow).

One thing I don't like is that the membership api seems deeply integrated with
Stripe only. That's okay for a start but in many countries in this world
Stripe is not available (for me it's the new PayPal. E.g. I'm based in Cyprus
and Stripe will not work here although it's EU) and I would welcome a better
flexibility or plugin system for other payment providers:

[https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0...](https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0b90f47cd908161171bb40/packages/members-
api)

Are there any plans for that? Do you think it is easy to integrate other
payment providers in future?

UPDATE: ok, I've seen your website FAQ
[https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-
payment-...](https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-
providers) I will not support a one payment gateway blog membersite. Sorry
Ghost.

Stripe censorship excludes basically (beside regions) also many topics.
Thinking about writing about intimate topics, erotica or health? Good luck in
using Stripe with that.

~~~
johnonolan
This is a first version. We're certainly planning to add more payment options,
including decentralised ones

~~~
Teichopsia
Yes, but when? Stripe has been saying the same thing. They will support more
countries, and yet, three years later they have yet to support many countries.

Don't get me wrong, I understand that a country can not be supported
magically. What I'm against are these comments that are written with (what I
believe to be) the best intentions.

But then it's posted, and the person who read it, years later is left with a
bad taste in his/her mouth.

~~~
disordinary
It's open source, there's nothing stopping you from integrating it with the
payment platform of your choice and contributing the code back to the project.

~~~
Teichopsia
It is! Oops... I just became that guy :P

But in my defense, it was a general sentiment and not directed to any - one -
individual - or company.

------
fortran77
Will the fans of Norton Ghost be complaining, the way the Elm MUA people
complain about Elm the programming language?

[https://www.symantec-
norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx](https://www.symantec-
norton.com/Norton_Ghost_15.0_p115.aspx)

~~~
LeoPanthera
I had to scroll down before I realised that this is not the disk imaging tool
"Ghost".

I've been retired from IT for a few years now - is Ghost (the disk utility) no
longer a thing?

I couldn't even guess how many hours I spent sitting in front of this screen:
[https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-
ghost.jpg](https://www.dmcinfo.com/Portals/0/vmware-norton-ghost.jpg)

~~~
fortran77
Actually, its the first think I think of too.

Now I use Acronis True Image (which works very well on Windows and I can
recover from a dead boot drive in no time!)

------
pimlottc
This article could some background about what Ghost is. There's no explanation
until about 6 paragraphs in, and it's only in an image, not in the article
itself.

> But you probably want to know about the $5M thing.

No, I'd rather know about what Ghost is :P

~~~
mdszy
It's almost like you can chop off the /blog/3-0/ part of the URL and it brings
you to a magical homepage that explains exactly that.

Do you really expect them to explain what their software is in every single
blog post they make about it?

~~~
lijogdfljk
As a general comment, _not in any way related to Ghost blog_ :

> It's almost like you can chop off the /blog/3-0/

It's an annoyance of mine in so many company blogs that going to their actual
product is so oddly difficult. Sure, I can chop off the URL because I
understand what that is, but what about non-technical users? They understand
links, not a damn thing goes back to the core product.

It's so weird to me that so many blogs are built around user engagement and
SEO, while lacking back linking to the actual product at all.

I've never understood it, but I see it so so often.

~~~
pwinnski
You can click on the header without resorting to any URL manipulation. When I
load the page, I see ghost, Product, Developers, etc, across the top, and even
as I scroll, the 'The Ghost Blog' stays with me, always clickable to reach the
homepage.

I'm not sure how going to their actual product could be made any more simple
or predictable. Do you have a suggestion?

~~~
lijogdfljk
Nope, I'll edit my post - I was merely talking about what the parent comment
said, not anything about Ghost.

The fact that they described modifying the URL made me think of so many blogs
I see without back links. I wasn't referring to Ghost at all _(I mentioned
that, but I 'll make it more clear)_.

Sorry for any confusion :)

------
tjbiddle
Congrats!

Slightly off-topic question: Is a handful of the Ghost team based in Bali? I
know the team is 100% remote and I've noticed multiple laptops with Ghost
stickers at my co-working center.

~~~
johnonolan
Not permanently, but there were quite a few of us in Bali this year (I think 7
at one point) working from Tropical Nomad. Now we've all moved on again!

------
brianpgordon
> The hard part is the publishing platform to integrate with the subscriptions
> and the billing - that's the part nobody else is doing - and we were getting
> pretty good at building a flexible, modern publishing platform.

Doesn't Medium sort of do this? I get that you can't run your own instance or
bill specifically for just your content, but otherwise it seems very similar.

~~~
emdowling
The two caveats/differences you mentioned are the biggest complaints against
Medium. Medium is a fantastic platform for finding an audience when you don’t
have one already. It’s an awesome way to just write and get your work out
there.

As the post mentions, Ghost 3.0 is targeted at people like Ben Thompson (in
the extreme case) who have an audience passionate/supportive/large enough to
pay them directly and who want to own the entire relationship with no
middleman.

------
vivin
Has the JSON file structure changed in v3? I am trying to migrate from
WordPress to Ghost and I was going to use v2, but now that v3 is out, I would
like to migrate to v3.

([https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/](https://ghost.org/docs/api/v2/migration/))

~~~
erisds
It hasn't changed (see
[https://ghost.org/docs/api/v3/migration/](https://ghost.org/docs/api/v3/migration/))

But also,
[https://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/](https://wordpress.org/plugins/ghost/)
has been overhauled to export from WP into a format you can import straight
into Ghost 3.0.

~~~
vivin
That is awesome -- I was looking to roll my own. This will make it much
easier.

------
nickjj
Serious question.

In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit
organisation releasing open source software.".

But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer
revenue and giving away 0% of the business.

So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business
generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even
give yourself a salary if you label yourself as a non-profit? What makes
paying yourself a salary as a non-profit different than a regular business?

Whenever I read sentences like that, it makes me very suspicious. Whenever I
see a Ghost blog post talking about the product it always feels like they try
to bring maximum attention to being a non-profit in a way that is supposed to
be less evil than a profitable business but then you talk about millions of
dollars of "business revenue" and I never understood how it works.

~~~
83457
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonprofit_organization)

"A nonprofit organization, also known as a non-business entity,[1] not-for-
profit organization,[2] or nonprofit institution,[3] is dedicated to
furthering a particular social cause or advocating for a shared point of view.
In economic terms, it is an organization that uses its surplus of the revenues
to further achieve its ultimate objective, rather than distributing its income
to the organization's shareholders, leaders, or members. Nonprofits are tax
exempt or charitable, meaning they do not pay income tax on the money that
they receive for their organization. They can operate in religious,
scientific, research, or educational settings.""

~~~
nickjj
That's still very confusing.

Surplus sounds like anything beyond hosting costs to run the service, but the
hosting costs is likely no where near 5 million dollars so a majority of it is
surplus.

Does that mean no one gets a salary or is a salary part of the costs to run
the business instead of being a "member"? If salaries are included who
dictates what the income tax exempt salary is?

I'm not trolling either. What you're describing sounds like a way to run a
business where you can avoid paying income tax while still getting a salary
because realistically I doubt the creator of Ghost is living in a homeless
shelter and working off public library computers.

~~~
velcrovan
Some Business 101 for you: Salaries are separate from profits. Salaries are a
cost to the business just like rent and hosting costs. Profits come after all
the costs. (Salaries are also taxed as personal income just like at any other
business.)

The $5m over 6 years is $833k in revenue per year. Not a lot, and
salaries/benefits probably take up the biggest part of that, leaving very
little profit. Which is the way it should be everywhere in my opinion.

I applied to work at Ghost a while back and still would love to work for them.
Not only do they get salaries, they have amazing benefits (by US standards).
Being a non-profit means two things: a) profits are reinvested in the business
rather than distributed to owners, and b) Ghost isn’t, and can never be, an
acquisition target by other companies or investors. That kind of stability is
a huge appeal for me, both as a user and a worker.

~~~
akerl_
I feel like this comment would be totally complete without the first 5 words,
which serve to make it condescending.

Part of the goal of this community is for its participants to learn things
they don’t know; the tone implied by the intro to your comment makes it seem
offensive that somebody wouldn’t realize US non-profit status still allows for
salaries and benefits for their staff.

[https://xkcd.com/1053/](https://xkcd.com/1053/)

~~~
Aeolun
I think that to a point this is caused by the attitude in OP’s own comments.
While it would be nice if it was possible to completely ignore it, I don’t
think that’s realistically possible.

~~~
akerl_
Perhaps I’m overly optimistic. I’m also optimistic enough to believe that the
comment I responded to wasn’t aiming to be condescending; the phrasing was the
kind of thing that could very well have sounded jovial in speech among
friends. I tend to think that’s the more common failing here: people type the
way they’d speak if they were having a chat at the pub after work, and a lot
of nuance burns off in the speech-to-text conversion.

In any case, the site guidelines ask us to counteract this by assuming good
faith, and responding to the strongest interpretation:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)

------
bbx
I've never tried Ghost, although their website always appealed to me (one of
the best designed website I know). I've been using WordPress for the past 13
years, for personal and also professional projects, which means the
familiarity I've built with building custom themes never drew me towards
trying another CMS.

But going through this blog post announcement, I saw that Ghost can be used as
a headless CMS with frontend frameworks. And since I started using GatsbyJS
extensively in the past year, it seems like something that would work _really_
well together.

(It turns out that the official website is actually built with GatsbyJS, so
the integration is probably really robust.)

Gonna try it out! And congrats on remaining true to your initial philosophy.

------
wlesieutre
Looks great, the payments integration is a great idea.

I've looked at Ghost on and off while considering setting up my personal site,
and pricing is the reason I avoided it. I think they started at $5/month for
"Ghost Pro" and are now up to $36 for Pro Basic or $99 for Pro Standard (a bit
less purchased in bulk). At a minimum, it's now $348/year.

Having paid subscriptions built-in makes that easier to swallow. I don't want
any 3rd party ad networks on my site, so subscriptions could help offset the
high costs.

Wouldn't help me personally since my site isn't very active and wouldn't get
subscribers, but I imagine this will work for some other folks.

~~~
Kihashi
I self host on a $5/month VPS and it works fine. Granted, I don't really have
much traffic, but it sounds like you don't either.

~~~
wlesieutre
Not much traffic, no. But "spend as little time administrating it as possible"
was a goal that had me looking into managed options.

Hugo + Netlify is working well, some up-front work in the setup since I didn't
want to use a premade Hugo theme, but when I update anything it just takes two
commands to rebuild and upload:

    
    
        hugo
        netlify deploy --prod
    

I'll eventually simplify that further since Netlify can run hugo builds
automatically from changes to a git branch.

Beyond that, it's just publish and forget. And the page speed is great (Google
scores it at 99) since Netlify is serving it off of a CDN.

------
kstrauser
I dig Ghost, but there are any number of client apps (like MarsEdit) that play
great with WordPress but not at all with Ghost. Are there plugins that let it
support a more widely used API so that it works well with those clients?

------
artpi
Fantastic work John!

The membership feature looks amazing and I honestly am very impressed by your
landing page since I work on something a bit similar :).

The Stripe Billing integration sounds exciting, but I am curious about the 0%
transaction fees. Stripe usually takes 2.9%+30c on charges and Stripe Billing
costs 0.4$ (free for the first $1M so we can ignore that).

Did you negotiate some kind of a special deal with Stripe or the 0% means that
YOU don't take additional fees, but Stripe fees are still there?

~~~
johnonolan
You connect your own Stripe account - so whatever fees are there are specific
to your setup. They vary widely based on your country, the customer's country,
currency and volume. The main difference with Ghost is that there are no
additional platform transaction fees - which there usually _are_ with every
other product in this space (generally another +5% - +10%. Hope that helps to
clarify!

------
tylermenezes
The most shocking thing about this post, to me, is that they've only made $5M
revenue in 6 years. After expenses, that's got to be a really small profit.

~~~
elicash
Is this low for open source projects? I mean, I'd imagine it's low compared to
WordPress.org -- but compared to other projects of its size this doesn't seem
low to me.

------
thesorrow
I wonder if taking the JAMStack route won't prevent you to become a real
alternative to Medium by making ActivityPub (federation) implementation harder
?

~~~
johnonolan
Watch this space :)

~~~
thesorrow
If ActivityPub is the next big feature count me in !

------
antigirl
I was the initial backer for Ghost when it was first on kickstarter, i was
very excited about the prospect. But after it release i felt quite cheated.
The progress was insanely slow, there were a discussion about responsive
images on their github which lasted probably months before anything was done
about it. It was very limiting still months after its initial release.
Naturally i lost interest.

------
dpeck
Congratulations on the release. I like the direction that they're going and it
feels like the only thing that it is missing to be able to replace the backend
on a LOT of sites is being able to add some type of custom fields (simple key
values) to posts. That combined with the subscription/membership they've added
here would be an very powerful platform for many uses.

------
40four
Great to see a new major release! I have used Ghost in a couple of projects,
and I am always impressed with the functionality & the flexibility to use it
how you want.

The built in editor and admin panel is great, but the real sweetness comes
from the REST API. The ability to integrate into any custom website is
fantastic!

------
tvanantwerp
Very cool that I can use Ghost as a headless CMS now. Going to have to give it
a try.

------
benfrain
Native comment system yet?

------
quaffapint
Any plans for a multi tenant setup with memberships?

