
Ghost Blogging Platform can now be used as a headless CMS - kn8
https://blog.ghost.org/jamstack/
======
jaredcwhite
This is fantastic news, and I'll definitely be taking a look. I do want to
point out, however, that there are a number of benefits to having your content
in a Git-backed file repository, rather than in a centralized database.

I understand why Ghost would want to promote using a headless CMS with a
database—it's great PR—but I hesitate recommending this as a slam-dunk
solution. For me, generally speaking, all the sites I build now are JAMstack
(Jekyll, with a custom Rails-based content editor), and having all the website
content in a Git repo is a huge part of that workflow and a major selling
point.

~~~
erisds
Take a look at our docs repo:
[https://github.com/TryGhost/docs](https://github.com/TryGhost/docs), built
with Ghost+GitHub+Gatsby.

All of our API docs are maintained by developers who are happiest in git and
markdown - so those files live in GitHub, with the added benefit of being
available for anyone to contribute to.

Meanwhile, our Ghost(Pro) documentation is maintained by our support team, and
integrations & tutorials are maintained by our marketing team - all people who
are happiest with the editor and workflows provided by Ghost.

The beauty of JAMstack is just how simple it is to combine multiple sources of
data into a single site. Power, flexibility, and most of all choice.

We're not ramming Ghost down anyone's throat. If you don't like it - you
really don't have to use it. The decoupling work we are doing intends to make
it possible for people to pick and choose bits of Ghost that they do like, and
use them however they want.

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johnonolan
Hi HN! John from Ghost here - happy to answer any questions about this. We
rebuilt our docs using Gatsby and the Ghost API last year and ended up liking
it so much that we rearchitected everything to make the the JAMstack workflow
a first class citizen :)

~~~
cityzen
Hi John! Congrats on everything with Ghost. Is it possible to run Ghost
locally and push a build out which is then deployed to S3, essentially
removing the "hosting" aspect of things outside of S3?

Do you have any resources you can point to that explains like I'm 5 where
Ghost ends and Gatsby starts? Most of my dev life lately has been CraftCMS and
Laravel but I'm convinced that some variety of serverless is where everything
is headed.

Thanks in advance!

~~~
johnonolan
Sure thing! I Gatsby generates static HTML files from 1 or more data sources,
which can be a filesystem or an API. When a Gatsby build runs, as long as it
can access the API in question, then it can pull the content needed to
generate a build. Once that build is completed, the resulting directory can
essentially just be dragged and dropped (literally, in the case of Netlify)
onto a hosting platform.

You can absolutely run all of these things locally and have no code running in
production at all, if that's what you want to do!

The benefit of having your content API in production is that it can be
accessed from anywhere, by anything - which opens up a lot more usecases.

Best way to get a handle on it all is to play with the starter repo, which
should be fairly easy to get up and running:
[https://github.com/tryghost/gatsby-starter-
ghost](https://github.com/tryghost/gatsby-starter-ghost)

~~~
cityzen
Awesome! Thanks for the info! Excited to try this out.

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marcperel
I love this, while the rest of the industry is focussing on coupling admin
interfaces with the front end, Ghost's focus on decoupling is a no-brainer.

Incredible work!

