

Ghost Blogging Software ported to PHP - techvibe2
http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/php-based-blogging-software-inspired-by-ghost/x/6230841
Here is a working demo http:&#x2F;&#x2F;blog.ospari.org&#x2F; Please spread the news and support us to make this a reality.
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shadowmint
> Currently we are working on the admin interface

What? Why is there no mention of the live markdown preview. That's what ghost
is.

Don't tell me how you've written a database layer, and I can have access to
the stupid ghost themes marketplace. I really don't care remotely about that;
wordpress has themes. And it talks to a database.

Tell me how you've got an amazing markdown php library with a websocket
connection that streams live updates, or even better, how you've made that
into a component you can drop into any php website.

-__-

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techvibe2
That is really a good point. I haven't written any markdown parser in PHP.
There are several Markdown parsers written in JavaScript. I use one of them.
Ospari don’t need any web socket connection. The posts are parsed and auto
saved as you type and you have a live preview like Ghost.

~~~
pilif
There are markdown parsers available for PHP ([http://michelf.ca/projects/php-
markdown/](http://michelf.ca/projects/php-markdown/) as an example), but the
websocket thing might be quite challenging. PHP's architecture doesn't lend
itself well for many concurrent long-running connections.

Unless you want to run out of RAM very quickly, you are much better off to do
everything involving long-running connections using node.js or any other
environment that works in an event based fashion as threads (and in case of
most safe PHP architectures, usually processes) are way too expensive for
that.

~~~
techvibe2
You are right about the PHP architecture. As wrote there is no need for web
socket. You can parse the markdown code in browser.

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debacle
From PHP to Node and now back to PHP. The circle of code.

~~~
techvibe2
No it is not a circle of product. Ghost and Ospari is by no wary comparable to
Wordpress.

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jbigelow76

        >Ghost and Ospari is by no wary comparable to Wordpress.
    

Regarding Ghost, it depends who you ask[1]. What the grand parent comment is
probably referring to is the same thing Rob Conery refers to in that Ghost (in
his estimation) was architected the way you would architect a large, modular
PHP application.

[1][http://www.wekeroad.com/2013/11/19/hello-
minty/](http://www.wekeroad.com/2013/11/19/hello-minty/)

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homersapien
This is a solution looking for a problem. Same with Ghost, though. At least
Ghost is ironic: a super simple blogging platform that requires fairly
sophisticated skills to setup and manage.

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techvibe2
The problem is already there. Install Wordpress, buy a beautiful theme and try
to configure it. You would be frustrated after 5 minutes…

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tgriesser
There's actually already an open source blogging platform called Wardrobe:
[http://wardrobecms.com](http://wardrobecms.com) using the Laravel PHP
framework, it has support for plugins, and is actively under development.

[https://github.com/wardrobecms](https://github.com/wardrobecms)

[https://github.com/wardrobecms/wardrobe](https://github.com/wardrobecms/wardrobe)

~~~
halfdan
"blogging platform" \- "wardrobeCMS". Uh, what now?

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ixmatus
Wouldn't it be easier to port some of Ghost's themes over to WordPress instead
of building a whole new blogging platform???

You could even raise funds for that! But I just don't see Ospari going
anywhere - the concept is not novel in anyway and there's also a PHP based
blogging platform that already dominates a lot of the internet.

Also, Ghost is open source no? I can't find any source files for Ospari...

Node.js + javascript is doing to PHP what PHP did to Pearl in some ways. I see
more people pushing that in my circles now than PHP - granted there's a lot of
selection bias happening.

Why not build this in Go? I'm sure plenty of people would get excited about
that.

[EDIT] If the "key feature" is live previews of markdown, why not fork
WordPress and build that feature into it? I'm sure a lot of people would love
that - or maybe you can do it as a plugin (I don't know WordPress well
enough)??

I just feel like there's a lot of "Not Invented Here" happening with your
project, which can be typical of engineering minds. Please focus your talents
on something truly novel!

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techvibe2
The key issue is the simplicity and the ease of use. Wordpress is not about
blogging any more. It is complicated and has a terrible code base. Writing
this in GO doesn’t make any sense, because GO is not simpler than Nodejs in
terms of setup and installation.

~~~
ixmatus
No, I'm pretty sure WordPress is still about blogging - it's got a lot of
other features too. Whenever I've talked to a single "average" user they have
never talked about "just the blog". Every single person wants to create pages,
control the navigation, mess with their templates, install that favorite SEO
plugin of theirs, integrate with MailChimp, have a login system, sell
ecommerce products.

Even Ghost is acceding to those needs with their Pages features and I'm sure
soon to exist plugins (if they don't have it already).

WordPress' codebase is not terrible. Kinda messy? Sure. Idiomatic? Not so
much. Does it work? Yes. Does it power millions of websites and blogs? Yes.

My point with Go is that if you want to have a successful project you have to
do something novel and there's nothing novel in what you're doing - you're an
engineer experiencing "I can do this better" syndrome. I do that all the time,
take a step back and _really think hard_ about what my value proposition is
(even for OSS projects). If it's already being served by some other project or
product and I want that thing to be "better" then it makes more sense to help
improve the other thing.

Or in Ghost's case, build it on an entirely different platform (which is
novelty), with novel features.

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Offler
Just work on making Ghost better if you have a problem with it, why would we
need yet another version of it? Because it's written in PHP?

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finne
I would imagine that being written in PHP is the main selling point for end
users who don't have the knowledge to set up a Node.js based website.

~~~
jbeja
Also taking in the global context, most hosting plans that are payed in the
specific country currency run on PHP without any configuration, just put your
PHP files there and puff...magic, a website is running

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teamonkey
I guess the problem is that many cheap hosting plans (such as Dreamhost) don't
run Node but they do run PHP.

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famousactress
This is a huge issue. A good friend of mine runs a webshop that builds custom
CMS', marketing websites, shopping portals, and occasionally pretty
sophisticated apps for clients. I've talked to him a lot about his industry
and PHP dominates because of hosting.

Not only are all the shared hosts really affordable and set up to support PHP,
but many larger clients have already invested in their "own" hosting setups,
either co-located or with local firms.

He's said there are agencies in his industry that have switched to RoR or
Django but that from his perspective a part of their model is the built-in
acceptance that the tech will cause friction because of hosting, offset by the
offer to host it for a fee...

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eik3_de
I don't see how running a ghost instance isn't easy or cheap, there are a lot
of options:
[http://www.howtoinstallghost.com/](http://www.howtoinstallghost.com/)

~~~
techvibe2
Can you easily install Ghost in sub directory like domain.tld/blog/?

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eik3_de
haven't tried it, but a quick search shows that ghost doesn't support it
natively but they are working on it. But is that a reason to do a complete
rewrite?

[edit: 0.4.0 does have complete subdir support:
[https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/wiki/Release-
Notes:-0.4.0#...](https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/wiki/Release-
Notes:-0.4.0#wiki-subdirectory-support)]

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greg5green
Interesting project but I'm a bit turned off by how this is all framed.

"We're building a new blogging platform that can use Ghost themes, check it
out" comes across a lot more positive than "We're porting Ghost to PHP, please
give us money to do this."

~~~
techvibe2
Thank you. I was looking for catchy headline. This headline didn't come to my
mind. On our actual campaign we don't use this title.

We would do it, even if no one gives us money. Some money would just
accelerate the process.

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techvibe2
Here is code example and how a controller works

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8805880](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8805880)

By no way comparable to Wordpress ;-)

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darkotic
is that Laravel?

~~~
techvibe2
No. It is not. We have developed a light weight and easy to use Framework

~~~
krapp
Why not build on an existing framework?

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techvibe2
Here is a working demo [http://blog.ospari.org/](http://blog.ospari.org/)
Please spread the news and support us to make this a reality.

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joshfinnie
Not sure how I feel about this. I think we need to move away from the idea of
"let's write this in PHP because it's easy." Best of luck to you though...

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paulgb
I think the sentiment is more "let's write this in PHP because it runs on
every $7 shared web host on the planet". Sadly, no other language can claim
this except maybe Perl.

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neverminder
Well then it's catch 22 isn't it? Unless we boycott PHP it will never go away
and hosting providers won't have any incentive to change.

~~~
RossM
I think you'd have better luck in making ways of supporting drag-and-drop
deployment for your preferred languages. I can't find it now but there was
such a tool for Python that allowed you to run Python scripts in the same way
as PHP (no app server as such).

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gregmolnar
It states it is open source but I struggle to find the source. Can someone
point me to the source?

~~~
techvibe2
Yes it is open source and it is free for personal and for commercial use, but
we have not released it yet.

~~~
gregmolnar
Ok, but can one look at the quality of the code before decides to support the
project? Is there a repo hosted somewhere?

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techvibe2
We have repo, but it is not public

Here a code example.

[https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8805880](https://gist.github.com/anonymous/8805880)

~~~
_mtr
This is a really weird approach to asking for support for an OSS project. Bad
vibes with this one.

~~~
techvibe2
Maybe you are right. We would move at least some of our code to Github to a
public repo soon.

------
techvibe2
Update: We just cleared the licensing issue. Ospari would be released under
MIT License.

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nikon
This is going to end well.

~~~
ixmatus
I don't have enough karma to downvote you but I will say that I think your
comment isn't adding to the conversation. He's someone with a project that he
feels strongly about; misguided or not thought through? Sure.

Instead of sarcasm, help this guy realize his talent for building software
could be directed in a more productive fashion than playing "copy cat".

~~~
nikon
To be fair I was going to explain why it was a bad idea but I find reasoning
with PHP developers very hard. As a recovering PHP developer myself, it will
just be ignored.

~~~
ixmatus
You'll find that with more than just PHP :( I'm seeing it with Ruby and JS /
Node too. Some developers are reasonable and great people but there's a
subsection that think {Ruby, Python, PHP, JS} are the bees knees. I use all of
those languages...

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danso
I'm a WordPress user and haven't tried Ghost...but it seems the impetus of the
OP is to port over the _" hundreds of beautifully designed themes for
Ghost"_..I know themes consist of front-end logic and backend code...but isn't
the "beauty" of these themes portable independent of scripting code?

~~~
techvibe2
Ghost Theme do not use any scripst. They use handlebars
([http://handlebarsjs.com/](http://handlebarsjs.com/)) syntax. We can parse
this syntax with PHP.

