Ghost CMS

Here are some thoughts about Ghost CMS, written after trying it out for like 10 minutes. I'm writing this down so that I can refer to it later when I'm thinking about moving off CraftCMS for the thousandth time because they haven't implemented dark mode and it hurts my eyes the three times a month I write new blog posts.

Ghost is focused much more on being a writing platform than a digital garden. My digital garden is to be fair pretty sparse but I like that I can write API handlers to run arbitrary PHP if I want to. And I do.

That being said, I don’t know that I like it as a writing platform either. The post UI is just WordPress Gutenberg. I don’t dislike that, generally speaking, but there’s something a little… clunky about it. It doesn’t feel snappy. It feels as though there’s a microscopic amount of lag on each keypress. Am I hallucinating it?

Here's a weird bug on the post UI: I can’t add links. I tried Cmd+K per the hints, but that just focused the search bar, here in Firefox. I wonder if there’s a event.preventDefault() missing somewhere.

The post UI also aims for tidiness & minimalism, which means that I couldn’t find a toolbar to manually add a link (i.e. with a mouse).

Everyone wants a newsletter; I just want an RSS feed. I don’t want a list of people’s email addresses. Ghost wants to collect people’s email addresses.

There’s a Delete button at the bottom of the settings page, where you’d expect it. This only deletes your content, however — not your account. I think I was able to delete my account by visiting Upgrade → Ghost(Pro) → Cancel Account. I say think because after I clicked through the dialog I got the “your account has been deleted email” but the UI timed out and showed me a “Something went wrong” message.

When I refreshed the page, the website seemed to be gone. Okay so that worked out.

Ghost is for:

• writers,
• who don’t use Firefox, and
• who want a newsletter, and
• are uncomfortable with Substack’s position on… things

I don’t think that’s me. Back to checking whether CraftCMS is working on dark mode.