
Microsoft Throws its Weight Behind Ghost - krisroadruck
https://medium.com/design-startups/e103e33a0fa8
======
gabemart

        O’Nolan, a former WordPress project lead himself , opines 
        that WordPress has grown up and is no longer really about 
        blogs anymore. It’s become a full-fledged content 
        management system, burdened with a lot of unnecessary 
        complexity for those that are just looking to manage a 
        blog.
    

WP is nothing close to a full-fledged content management system, and if it's
burdened by anything, it's all the leftover cruft from the days when it _was_
just about blogging.

I use WP every day and I'm really grateful it exists. But from my perspective,
the problem is not "WP is so great at content management we need to develop
something just about blogging". The problem is "Lots of people have cleverly
managed to hack WP into running as a general purpose CMS because there's such
a wealth of support, knowledge and extensability surrounding it".

I'be be much more interested in a new modern, flexible CMS built for that
purpose from the ground up than I am about a new blogging software.

~~~
DigitalSea
Serious question: Have you used Wordpress before? For what it lacks out-of-
the-box 9 times out of 10 exists in the form of a plugin (sometimes multiple
plugins). I don't see what Wordpress lacks personally other than a coherent
file structure and clean codebase...

 _I 'be be much more interested in a new modern, flexible CMS built for that
purpose from the ground up than I am about a new blogging software._

Sounds like you're talking about Drupal here or ExpressionEngine which are
both great and well-written content management systems. Wordpress serves many
purposes, clean code doesn't matter so much at the end of the day unless
you're a code purist who thinks languages and conventions matter if the end
product works and is usable.

~~~
andyhmltn
>clean code doesn't matter so much at the end of the day unless you're a code
purist

Or you're unlucky enough to have to build a theme/site around wordpress

~~~
ryanSrich
We build hundreds per year. Is it a huge pain in the ass to maintain a theme
with 65 plugins that's 3 releases behind? Of course! But hey, that's part of
the job.

------
stickhandle
In the end, who cares. I'm intrigued by Ghost. I signed up for access ... but
I have also been intrigued by the many alternatives to WP out there -
Octopress, Squarespace, Kirby, on and on. That's because I'm a hacker. But ...
in the end WP is to this space as Excel is the spreadsheets. Its just too
good. Has so much to offer. As long as we're talking about presenting
html/css/js in a browser for non-dynamic sites, WP pretty much does
everything. Its just lost its shiny|new status. Bloat? An easy and convenient
insult. Truth is Excel has capabilities I will never use ... but it pleases me
to know they are there if/when I need them. What gets lost in the argument
that WP is so big, so capable that its not a blog engine anymore but rather a
cms, is that it is entirely capable of powering _just your blog_ with a whole
bunch of features you won't use. But when you decide to do "X", you can pretty
much guarantee you'll find a quality option/extension to handle it. Its
interesting to the likes of folks on HN (and I count myself among this crowd)
to find new and exciting ways to do things, but if the outcome is the same ...
IOW - what is truly different. It can't just be "how", but "why" and "what".

~~~
malandrew
My biggest complaint about Wordpress when I first had to mess around with the
codebase last year is that it is an exercise in masochism. We've moved to much
better tools for HTML templating in the last 10 years, yet WordPress in 2013
is stuck with the most awkward approach I've ever dealt with.

~~~
stickhandle
"Most awkward"? Really? Its not _nice_ and it definitely carries around some
baggage that is a direct result of its evolutionary history, but there is
always a way to get what you need. I won't defend its beauty. But i guess my
questions to any WP vs. X questions would be - 1. Do you know what you need
tomorrow? 2. Are you interested in _getting it done_ or in the elegance of the
solution.

~~~
dkuntz2
Why can't you get it done and have an elegant solution? WordPress kinda forces
you away from elegant solutions, but other CMSs don't...

------
px1999
TL;DR: a small team at Microsoft (modern.ie) have a site old-ie compatibility
scanner that they've written in node and want to integrate into a CMS. This
probably isn't a larger strategy or play at Microsoft. It might be a sign of
internal change among developers there, which might change their business
strategy at some point in the future, but they're definitely don't seem to be
"throwing their weight around" just yet.

They already have far larger investments in plenty of other CMSes:

* Sharepoint (the goose that lays the golden eggs),

* Umbraco (which IIRC runs asp.net, iis.net, windowsazure.com, and possibly [parts of] technet and msdn),

* Orchard (which is theirs, albeit through the OuterCurve foundation, which is one of MS' OSS outreaches),

* MCMS (which is horribly old & expensive, but still out there and in use),

* A bunch of internal CMSes, and other stuff that they developed themselves to tie in with backend systems (eg CRM)

Hell, they did more with Oxite before abandoning that than they're planning
with Ghost.

Maybe MS as a company want to get more into node, but that doesn't really seem
in line with their larger strategy (even though they definitely are starting
to embrace OSS more, particularly on the web teams) - so it's probably just
likely that one team wanted somewhere that they could test out the library
they've written.

~~~
krisroadruck
the plugin wasn't what got them contributor status. The $50K they paid was.
Given that accounts for fully 1/4th of the total amount raised.... I'd say its
not such a pittance as a plugin.

~~~
px1999
Aah, I didn't see that in the article - I can find a kickstarter post
referencing them as a partner, but didn't find anything talking about a 50k
figure.

I guess that figure does represent a significant investment (their
contributions to other CMSes aside), particularly at the current early stage
of Ghost's development.

------
rquantz
I've been thinking about what should replace Wordpress in the CMS space (as
opposed to blogging). There are a lot of aspects of Wordpress that make it
great, and a lot of things that make it absolutely terrible. I think part of
its problem is that it seems intended to be a platform that non-developers can
maintain themselves, while presenting features that really require a
developer. As a result, it is not a suitable environment either for non-coders
or coders.

I'd love to see a platform that is easily deployed on shared hosting (written
in php, using mysql) but that lends itself better to version control and
switching environments. It should keep configuration in plain text instead of
in the database, and it should allow easy definition of node types in addition
to the standards (post, page, comment, etc.). These should also be defined in
plain text instead of in the database (I'm looking at you, Drupal). Meanwhile,
theming should be just as easy as with Wordpress.

Anyway, it's good to see others trying to enter the blogging platform space
and compete with Wordpress, but I really want to see a truly good CMS come
along.

~~~
malandrew
Why PHP and MySQL?

JavaScript, since it is the only thing that runs in the browser, is a much
better choice since the barrier to building and maintaining a site isn't too
far from the reach of a novice because only one Turing complete language is
required.

With respect to MySQL. Given what WordPress does today and all the other
options out there, is WordPress still the best tool for the job?

Why not Postgres or MariaDB? Or how about NoSQL options? Is there an option
which would permit development to be just as easy, but that avoids the
security complexity of a database exposed to code injections because it
execute arbitrary code snippets?

~~~
te_chris
Exactly, a new CMS should drop sequel and move to mongo or a similar document
store. Being able to arbitrarily add fields to a page, enabled by a store like
mongo seems like a no brainer for a CMS.

~~~
alanctgardner2
MongoDB is definitely not a no-brainer - what actual benefit is there to being
able to 'arbitrarily add fields to a page'? The whole application layer has to
support an arbitrary schema anyways, which is bound to be a security and
config nightmare.

~~~
Torgo
Look at the mysql schema of a Drupal system. Either you support arbitrary
fields at the database level, or you write a ton of extra code (which will
have bugs) and piles of support tables on top of your relational database.
It's a waste of time and effort and adds unnecessary complexity.

~~~
alanctgardner2
I still don't think the correct solution is to just give up on the relational
model and store a bunch of denormalized documents. Just because Drupal has
technical debt (which is not surprising to me) doesn't mean it's impossible to
model a CMS in a relational way. Can you point me to a particular part of
Drupal which is well suited to the Mongo document model over relational,
versus simply 'well it's relational now and they cocked it up'?

------
narrator
Blogs are way too simple to reinvent every few years. Wordpress is fine. Can't
we move on to something more complicated than Blogs and Crud apps?

~~~
jerf
It's just the turn of the wheel. Should Ghost succeed, odds are quite good
that in about seven years, you'll be reading about how old and crufty Ghost
is, held back by it's aging Node.js platform, and how some new hotness or
other is coming along to give you _just_ blogging (or whatever).

To a first approximation, every web project starts life as a "clean, simple X
without all that cruft". It is the destiny of most projects to follow that
with A: failure or B: becoming the next pile of sludge to inspire a "clean,
simple X".

~~~
narrator
This is where statically typed code bases really shine IMHO. I've seen >10
year old Java code bases that are maintainable because of all the automated
re-factoring that can be done to clean up naming inconsistencies and deprecate
various mistakes. With dynamic languages cruft and little mistakes just keep
building up till people give up trying to maintain it and want to start over.

~~~
gnaritas
Automated refactoring came from dynamic languages. Just because the popular
ones lack it doesn't mean it's not done. Smalltalk's refactoring browser works
very well.

~~~
malandrew
I'm curious how easy it is to build automatic refactoring tools on top of a
dynamic language that was not designed to support it, versus a static language
that was. I reckon that the formalism enforced by static typing would provide
enough vigor to greatly increase the chances that you can bolt on automatic
refactoring as an afterthought. My impression is that the SmallTalk designers
adopted some automatic refactoring early on because they developed their tools
alongside the language and by doing so, the language informed the tools and
vice versa.

~~~
gnaritas
Smalltalk wasn't designed to support it, it's decades older than the concept
of automated refactoring. It is much easier to do in static languages, and
doing so in dynamic languages requires code analysis at runtime. As it's
always runtime in Smalltalk this fits naturally, it wouldn't be so in Ruby or
Python where you're working on text files rather than a runtime.

~~~
malandrew
Cool. Thanks for the clarification. Language design is something that I'm
increasingly taking an interest in.

------
scheff
Why are we still writing in mark down? Fair enough, as a techie, it's just
assumed you will learn another "language" and be productive. But a creative
writer shouldn't have to think "how many #'s do I need to press? what's the
shortcode for italics?" They just want to be free to create. But they also
want to see their masterpiece coming to life in all it's glory.

We've mastered the "Word editor" and it gives immediate feedback without
reaching for a reference manual, why would we (inclusive: all writers) take a
step backwards?

~~~
mfn
One benefit is that it's portable: your text will be rendered properly with
the correct formatting anywhere markdown is supported (github, forum comments,
blog post, etc). It essentially frees you from having to worry about layout
and visual styling, which shouldn't interfere with the writing process.

~~~
rat87
There's no markdown _standard_ (although I think some implementers were
talking about it) beyond the original implementation, some implementations may
not even support that I believe _hacker news supports a subset_. It is
portable in the sense that you get(probably browser portable) simple html
after running it through a probably open source markdown implementation as
opposed to complex word formatting formats like odf or docx.

------
ddw
I'm really excited for Ghost for the simple reason that it's written in Node.
That means if this really takes off there will be pluggable modules that can
do anything that you'd like without adding to the code base. I think it would
make a lot of sense if the core team doesn't add much to the initial code base
and rather iterates on the UI right and works on growing the community because
that is what is going to make the project take off.

Really smart move by Microsoft, if for no other reason than tons of people are
going to be saying "wait, whut, where do I install this?" soon and if
deployment is first class to Azure at least they'll have a lot of new people
in the door.

Also I think there's plenty of room for evolution in blogging. There are so
many places that we create content now whether it be audio, photos, video or
microblogging and there isn't a widely used way of curating your online self
at all of these mediums. My personal website is on Syte
([https://github.com/rigoneri/syte](https://github.com/rigoneri/syte)) for
this very reason that it displays my social network content next to my blog
posts in a way that is more coherent than just a widget.

------
jmspring
"Compared to WordPress’s bulky editor and aging PHP code base, the difference
is striking."

Well established product versus something that has not been around awhile. It
has nothing to do with the language the code was written in, it is a product
with a past versus a new product that has learned from preceding projects.

------
grannyg00se
"an ease to writing that makes it pleasant to compose text formatted for the
web...Compared to WordPress’s bulky editor and aging PHP code base, the
difference is striking."

I don't know anything about WordPress's bulky editor, but how does the code
base have any relevance to front end usability?

~~~
robryan
Was thinking the same. I can see what they might be getting at if you compare
Wordpress + mods vs clean Ghost. I doubt once considered fully featured that
Ghost would be so much more efficient as to make it a key point of
differentiation, for the average small blogger anyway.

------
cimorene12
I backed Ghost on Kickstarter and I really like the idea of an ultra simple
platform. I have had blogs for years on Tumblr and Blogger, but I'd certainly
be open to using Nolan's work.

~~~
krisroadruck
Same. Looking forward to getting beta access in a couple of weeks. I built a
little solar powered raspberry pi node box that'd certainly benefit from a
little node-based blog :-D

~~~
joeblau
I'm looking forward to getting the BETA as well. I have been e-stalking this
project :)

------
lcnmrn
This already exists today: no need for funding, no need for self hosting,
Microsoft is not involved in any way, beautiful typography, local storage for
writing, nice profiles, stories ranking, a responsive design, made by a
designer who writes code. An export to Jekyll feature is coming soon, so you
can take the markdown documents to any other platform or just make a blog out
of it.

Give it a try: [http://markdawn.com/](http://markdawn.com/)

~~~
7schlaefer
Excuse me, but what exactly is this supposed to be? I took about 5 minutes to
figure out the UI, there are bugs with logging back in after (accidentally)
logging out, and it throws what I write in some kind of global timeline thing?

EDIT Not to mention the fact that I WANT to self-host!

~~~
lcnmrn
It isn't ready for a "show HN". Global timeline is there for getting exposure.
It looks intimidating now, but it shouldn't. Thanks for trying it!

Self-hosting and updating an entire web app is not very realistic these days,
but exporting in a ready to deploy site is a feature I'm thinking about. It
isn't implemented yet.

I don't want this to have a private mode, everything is public. You can't
guarantee privacy these days. My target is more towards what Medium and Svtble
are doing, than WordPress.

~~~
7schlaefer
>Self-hosting and updating an entire web app is not very realistic these days,
but exporting in a ready to deploy site is a feature I'm thinking about. It
isn't implemented yet.

Ah, now I get it. That _would_ be a nice feature.

>I don't want this to have a private mode, everything is public.

Is there a preview functionality? If not, that would be an important feature.

>You can't guarantee privacy these days

That's true, but you can still give users a little privacy if you want to. I
personally wouldn't want to write on that platform without a drafts/preview
folder, but that might just be me.

~~~
lcnmrn
Not sure if you're still interested in the project. But there's an update:

1\. Export was implemented. You get a nice ZIP archive with all your .md
documents.

2\. Regarding preview/drafts — there's one draft which is saved locally on the
user machine. You start writing and it's saved automatically.

3\. There's a new modern design and profile activity.

------
methodin
What happens when the blogs that inevitably grow bigger than a platform need
to turn into a community and something more? Surely just a blogging platform
will not suffice.

How many people actually use Wordpress for just a blog, anyway? This is all
reminiscent of the early blogging platforms that did one thing well but in
reality most people need more than that one thing if it's something more than
an area to post personal musings.

~~~
lukeschlather
if all you need is a place to post personal musings, Jekyll is really al you
need. the missing piece then is just a good WYSIWYG markdown editor.

~~~
dkuntz2
Maybe.

I've been using a host of static site generators for about a year now, and for
the less serious blog they seem to get in the way. I'd prefer to have
everything online, accessible from any computer with an internet connection.
Posting quick, little thoughts is not something Jekyll or other static site
generators do well.

For the more serious blog, which has infrequent and longer posts, I really
like the static site generator, because it lets me keep everything together
and easily deal with it locally.

~~~
hellweaver666
This weekend I've been playing with Kirby. It's a static site generator
powered by PHP that runs on Markdown powered text files _but_ it also has an
optional control panel for editing posts if you need that.

~~~
dkuntz2
I looked at Kirby. My problem is I don't really want to pay for it. Were I to
pay, I'd probably go with Statamic, which is similar to Kirby, but looks
nicer.

Mostly I don't want to pay because I like the idea of open source, and having
the ability to submit a fix if I find a bug appeals to me. And partially
because I'm cheap.

------
pearjuice
Wordpress is plug and play on almost any webhost out there (some even have
installers for it). Ghost is node.js which is barely supported by webhosting
companies (you will most likely need a VPS or some specific node.js HaaS, at
least).

Will this not be a huge barrier to achieve the same traction Wordpress has?

------
ilaksh
I actually think that if a project like Ghost becomes really popular it is
almost guaranteed to end up with a full scale plugin system and therefore
become a type of operating system despite what the founder thinks about that.

I think we do need something with an updated stack that has capabilities
somewhat like WordPress. Here is an idea that I started on a while back.
(Obviously not very pretty and needs a lot of refinement.)
[http://vimeo.com/43784316](http://vimeo.com/43784316)

------
krisroadruck
If you can believe it, this story was originally pitched to ReadWrite. They
rejected it and instead ran 10 stories about the new iPhone that day. The
following link is a pic of the analytics stats on this article from today.
Thanks guys, over 9000 thanks to you :-)

[http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5511/9769041391_c52d600437_o.p...](http://farm6.staticflickr.com/5511/9769041391_c52d600437_o.png)

------
Fearless_Shultz
I'm curious how many folks have issues with WordPress from a pure user /
author perspective so outside of how the code is written or a site is
installed Also what are your thoughts on how responsive Automattic are to user
feedback for publishers?

~~~
dkuntz2
I've found that since WordPress switched to the current sidebar navigation
over the old one (the four main headings, of which _Write_ was first, iirc)
it's a pain to write blog posts.

I'm also not a fan of the large number of additional options available for
posts. I'd rather have zero options, just write text and hit post. I
understand why it has all of the options, but I'm partial to simpler systems
that do one thing really well, as opposed to big systems (like WP) that do
lots of things acceptably.

------
shadowOfShadow
Why ghost? Not PHP & MySQL. Why MS + ghost? Services in Azure. Node is already
there.

------
thatthatis
Great, but why can't we download it yet?

~~~
jamesgeck0
Because they promised early beta access to Kickstarter backers. The lowest
tier of rewarded backers gets access within the next week, and the codebase
will be open to everyone some indeterminate short amount of time after that.
I'd be surprised if it the delay was more than a month or so.

~~~
7schlaefer
That is good to hear because this one looks pretty great and I was downright
annoyed when I found out it were not out yet.

