Ghost, one of the two big brothers in the self-deployed blog engine world, has just been updated to version 4.0. With a simple design, exquisite theme, convenient deployment of the blog engine GHOST, which can be called a strong competitor of the old blog platform WordPress, the update is to make GHOST in all aspects greatly improved.
The new edition inherits the excellent design style and editing experience and enables creators to excel in Newsletter, Membership and Subscription system, allowing creators to maximize their creative income.
In the GHOST 4.0 release, I take this opportunity to recommend to you to use GHOST to build your blog site. Ghost itself is an open-source, free blog engine hosted on Ghost.org for a fee, or we can deploy Ghost on our servers for our blog editing, management, and publishing.
Excellent article editing and management experience
The most important and core function of the content site, led by a blog, is writing, managing, and publishing articles. As an excellent blogging engine, Ghost's article editing and writing experience are second to none.
Ghost's rich text editor supports quite a bit of Markdown syntax, selects text in bold, italics, and so on, supports auto-saving drafts of articles for online writing, and has a "what you see is what you get" article preview. All this makes the use of GHOST online direct article writing experience extremely excellent.
With this update, Ghost Editor has added a similar/menu feature to the Notion experience, which can be used to insert different "modules." Some of the most common modules we have are images (sheets and albums), link bookmarks, YouTube videos, Twitter tweets, etc. Ghost has support for all of them. Also, Ghost can be embedded directly into Spotify songs and albums, Vimeo videos, Unsplash images, Codepen code blocks, and more. A host of third-party services support the variety of articles written and published using Ghost.
In addition to the content of the article, we in the Ghost sidebar can also be convenient to set the article cover, tag, preview, release range and other properties, can also directly edit such as shared to Twitter, Facebook and other social media preview pictures and preview text and so on. Ghost also has direct access to the service of Unsplash. We can directly insert high-quality images of Unsplash without copyright as our article cover.
Ghost's live preview also lets you see how articles will look on your computer, mobile phone, and email feed, and you can even preview how items will look when shared on Facebook, Twitter, and searched on Google.
Direct preview of how articles will look when shared and searched
At the same time, the GHOST management background is also evident and straightforward. Following the regular blog post-release process, Ghost has three "post buffers": Drafts, Scheduled and Published. In this way, we can easily manage the article's release status, regularly release the report, edit and withdraw the item at any time...
Ghost also has support to join or set different permissions of the author to invite other contributors and authors into our Ghost platform to edit and publish articles.
Another reason many writers choose Ghost is its rich blog theme. Since its birth, Ghost has been known for its simple management, back-end management interface for editing articles, and rich and well-designed blog themes. Even its default theme, Casper, has been copied and ported by many other blog engines.
Unlike many blog engines, which require manual code modifications to edit topics, Ghost site customizations of many properties require no code. We use GHOST deployment of blog ICONS, theme colours, cover pictures, LOGO and so on, which can be set directly on the GHOST backstage management page. When we created the new GHOST site, the 4.0 version of GHOST also added a new guide page to help students who are not familiar with the code or complex Settings quickly customize the blog's design style.
Also, the Ghost change set Theme method is also very convenient; in addition to the Theme setting page of a few default themes, in the Ghost Theme Marketplace, we can also download various official and third-party articles to add to our deployment of the Ghost site.
We need to download the corresponding theme file compression package, and in the GHOST background theme upload, you can apply the theme to our site. There are currently 15 Ghost themes available for free, and the rest may require a fee to download.
Rich 3rd party plugins
Deep integration with popular third-party services is also a powerful feature of Ghost as a blogging platform. At the official Ghost Integrations, you can find nearly 100 third-party services that Ghost supports, including Google Analytics, Slack, MailChimp, GitHub, and more.
Rich Ghost plugin market
With these third-party services, we were able to expand our Ghost Blog considerably. For example, we can directly connect Google Analytics to our blog to monitor and analyze blog traffic, article readership, and so on. We can access Disqus for Ghost blog to add comments; We can also use Netlify to help us output Ghost sites as static pages to speed up the loading and accessing of blogs.
With the help of a powerful automation platform Zapier, we can also customize many automation features so that our GHOST blog can easily access our daily articles published, Newsletter updates, member Settings and so on. If you don't want to write articles directly in the browser, Ghost also supports syncing and publishing articles now from Ulysses or IA Writer through the corresponding plugin.
As a functional blog engine, Ghost and WordPress plugin support in the form of a third-party service, but I think both from the configuration and introduces functions of the Ghost, should be concise and clear, let the Ghost users quickly get started to configure often require complex processes, or even write some code to complete function.
This lets Ghost Blog output RSS, generate Newsletter, set HTTPS, compile static site, and other functions without tedious code. It can be configured successfully, reducing many good content publishers' threshold to build an article subscription system.
Member subscription, article payment, Newsletter push
In addition to the third-party support mentioned above, Ghost 4.0 updates the blockbuster feature: its direct integration of native member subscriptions, paid articles, and Newsletter pushes ecosystem. Ghost Native provides a subscription channel for Portal members, with native support for both free items by mail and paid themes for members to read.
As content creators, we only need to set up a good entry member registration in GHOST and adjust the registration page's style. Ghost will direct visitors to the site to sign up for new memberships, mail subscriptions, and if we plug in Stripe payments to the site, we can also get our supporters to sign up as paid members.
These additional features do not need redundant service Settings, in the GHOST can be fully configured, very convenient.
Setup of the Ghost Portal member login page
In the article's edit page, we can use Public Preview's split module to set up the accessible viewing area of the article, thus guiding members to pay to subscribe to the report.
Use the Public Preview module to set up a paywall for articles.
Mature content creators or creative team, using Ghost, members of the native system can not only to the user good reading, subscription, Newsletter email notification of experience, can also be in 4.0 new member management page to view the article open Email, reading and reading rate and direction of the analysis of the content creation and the popularity of the article, to better adjust the content, fast development, the formation of a virtuous cycle.
These features have been built into the GHOST blog platform; without miscellany configuration or code deployment, the author friends can quickly start.
Free self-deployment solution
Finally, because GHOST is an open-source, free blogging platform, so if GHOST (PRO) - GHOST official website to provide a paid hosting platform with a minimum price of 9 USD a month is too expensive for individual authors, we can also directly deploy the GHOST on our low-cost cloud server.
Ghost self-deploys a variety of solutions.
Any cloud service providers can deploy GHOST, including the well-known domestic Ali cloud, Tencent cloud, etc. Foreign famous Digital Ocean, LINODE cloud service providers are also GHOST official recommended deployment site. The deployment process is a bit cumbersome and requires a particular codebase.
Digital Ocean's Marketplace, however, offers Ghost's one-click deployment Droplet, which is the simplest of the self-deployment options and costs a minimum of $5 per month for less than Ghost's website hosting service.
Digital Ocean is a relatively inexpensive deployment solution.
In any case, Ghost can be fully deployed directly on our servers, allowing us to enjoy the most complete content creation management platform at the lowest cost. Of course, if you want to now without any configuration, the most convenient use of GHOST, I recommend GHOST (PRO) official hosting services.
To sum up, the simple design style of Ghost blog system, excellent theme market and excellent plugin support are the reasons why I recommend Ghost more than WordPress. Version 4.0 GHOST in the improved membership subscription, article payment and Newsletter after the native approval, more suitable for a continuous output of content creators or teams to use, is a complete available content output system.
The open-source nature also encourages me to recommend capable students to deploy a powerful Ghost on their servers so that light bloggers can use Ghost. Ghost makes it easy to write, publish, manage, and monitor blog posts. It also allows creators to rely on a single system for membership, payments, newsletters and other features that require additional configuration on other platforms.
No matter how to use it, GHOST is a good blog platform; I recommend using GHOST to build their blog site. That's the end of this article. Thank you for reading.
