👋 Hey Product Hunters!
After 6 years, I'm super excited to share Ghost 3.0 with you — this is the biggest release we've done since the very first version of Ghost, and is absolutely full of new stuff. The link of the post goes to an overview of everything that shipped today, and an accompanying blog post about why we worked on those particular features, but I thought I'd use this opportunity on PH to give a bit of backstory.
👻 The Origin
Just in case you've never heard of us - a quick recap! Ghost launched in 2013 on Kickstarter as a new take on the traditional blogging platform. The difference: Deeply focused on publishing (rather than generic website-building), blazing fast modern codebase, fully open source permissive MIT license, with a sustainable business model, structured as an independent non-profit organisation. To date, there’s still not a single other platform which offers all those things in one place!
🚀 So what's 3.0 all about?
Well, what started out as my life's work has turned into a team of 15 people spread all over the world making free open source software, actively used in production by people including Apple, Tinder, The Stanford Review, DuckDuckGo, Mozilla, OpenAI and many more.
While so much of the early product was Hannah and myself hacking away to get a prototype out the door, these days there's just a lot more that goes into each release. In fact, the reason we're able to ship such a big update this time around is hugely influenced by how the team has grown in the last few years, and the incredible people who now work on Ghost full time. They're the ones who made all of this possible.
Fundamentally, Ghost 3.0 is all about enabling new business models for publishers based on building real, engaged audiences.
👨👩👧👧 Ghost now includes native support for memberships, turn your anonymous pageviews into registered users who are part of a community
💸 We've also built a deep Stripe integration to enable subscription commerce for all publishers. You can spin up a site like Stratechery, Sinocism, or The Information in just a few clicks. With 0% transaction fees.
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BTW - If you want to see a live demo of this in action:
Today I launched my new site using Ghost members and subscriptions, it's called https://rediverge.com - I'm looking forward to getting back to publishing again with a new and improved format.
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🛠 A JAMstack native architecture, Ghost is the #1 most popular open source headless CMS out there, and has documented integrations with Gatsby, Next, Hexo, Nuxt, VuePress, Gridsome and Eleventy.
🔌 A huge amount of new integrations for all your favourite products and services with Ghost
⚙️ Lots of improved automation with a new WordPress migration plugin, a new Github Action for continuous deployment, a new default theme with native Dark Mode support, and much more.
Oh, and of course all of this is still completely open source.
We've now passed 15,000 commits to Ghost, and the product has grown up tremendously from its early roots back in 2013. Here are some throwback screenshots of some of the earliest releases of Ghost: https://imgur.com/a/HIajekL (phew, glad we've improved a bit since then)
📢 Thanks for reading! We'll be hanging out in the comments all day if you have any questions :)
@johnonolan I just saw https://rediverge.com/about/ wow! amazing. Stripe Checkout + Sign up so good!!! And also i love the darkmode as well. Well done!!!!!!!!!!!! So impressive on Jamstack too!
@johnonolan this is awesome. One question - will you all ever consider offer a version paid for by a % of payments processed like Substack? Makes it much easier to get started, especially if you're not exactly sure how you're going to monetize yet.
@levelsio@johnonolan for some reason, when you import from wordpress, there are additional < p > tags inserted for paras, not really a conversion option to blocks for editing?
👋 Hey @johnonolan,
Congrats with the launch! 🤜
Great to see 1 big update from Ghost per year!
2014: Ghost 0.1
2017: Ghost: 1.0
2018: Ghost: 2.0
2019: Ghost: 3.0
Ghost is the big inspiration for all indie SaaS business!
Questions:
1. Is it possible to have something like Patreon business model, where all of my articles are pubic, but some people can make recurrent donations and I can put their names on sponsored page?
2. Are you planning to make a recommendation engine where I can discover authors based on my interests so I can follow them be notified when the publish new article?
@erwblo You can set posts to be public of private on an individual level, as well as a global default - there's no requirement to have _any_ of your posts private, or require payment!
@andreyazimov@johnonolan I’m hearing harps and seeing angels because of this. I love this product, and the new updates is making this a lifelong marriage.
@levelsio Definitely not everything. But I think increasingly people are willing to pay for niches which are in an area that they care deeply about. I think in the long term, lots of people will have non-overlapping subscriptions to a few things they're most interested in, and that the long tail of small subscription businesses could be really great for the next generation of the open web and smaller communities within it.
This looks so interesting, and solves so many issues for publishers. Are there other payment options, besides Stripe? Stripe, unfortunately not available everywhere.
@ebrahimkhalil Totally :) For this first release Stripe is the billing gateway we've partnered with, but we'll definitely be listening to user feedback around what other payment gateways would be important to see in future.
@ebrahimkhalil@johnonolan I realize you can't make solutions for every country, but in the Netherlands more or less Ideal is default. It's possible to implement that in Stripe. So if there is room on the todo list ;-)
exciting update! (and great design on the rediverge "demo" page too btw!). Is there an API to use the new members feature despite using Ghost as headless CMS, e.g. with Gatsby?
@bloodhound5 Not yet! To start with Members is tightly integrated with Ghost's native front end, but we're definitely interested in exploring options where identity can be headless too
Huge congratulations to the entire Ghost team on a massive launch. Thanks for continuously working toward a product that provides so much value to the publishing community. And thanks for doing it with a soul. 🙂
Super excited to read Rediverge and play around with the new 3.0 features!
Congrats on the big launch @johnonolan! Also amazing work on the new design. Not only does the design look beautiful, you really nailed the head with the way you structured the content. This is gonna convert so well!
@dannypostmaa Thanks Danny! I enjoyed your Tweet analysis of the design actually, you totally nailed each part of the thought that went into the page. Really glad it resonated!
@johnonolan Glad you enjoyed it! Aileen texted me the exact same about the Tweet Storm haha! I am using the same template with clients too, partly inspired by the StoryBrand book.
Congratulations! I've been running our development blog on Ghost for a few years and love it. Our marketing blog is on the 'other' blog engine and I avoid it like the plague. Ghost is just so much easier, lightweight, reliable and functional that I will keep fighting to keep our dev blog on it. Looking forward to upgrading to 3.0 soon.
Wow! You are giving anyone the power to monetize their written work, and potentially become financially independent from it. What could be more meaningful?
Have been exploring a ton of diff CMS options for our company blog and Ghost was on the list...now it just rose to the top of that list! Congrats on the launch!
@johnonolan I just wanted to thank you. To you and the whole team for this incredible release. I believe I need to update my website ASAP: https://a-data-driven-guy.com.
Favorite features?
- Integration with newsletters
- Members
- The New Stack
Kudos to the whole crew.
If the mint UI and data schema doesn't make you stoked, read the mission, values, and business model. Effects may cause extreme delight, excitement, and personal development considerations. You can write stories too.
@vinod_kumar_kashyap Thanks so much! I'm amazed just how many people have already signed up :) will be adding much more to the site over the next few days
I've been staring at this error for a while now:
Update WordPress
Downloading update from https://downloads.wordpress.org/...…
Download failed.: The checksum of the file (d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e) does not match the expected checksum value (e63b57efd074c2054cc44816ae70a97a).
Installation Failed
So yes, I'm all in for Ghost3. (Potentially.)
Congrats on the v3 launch Ghost team! Looking stellar as always and that membership recurring income slider is 🔥
ps. just signed up at Rediverge - looking forward to the good behind-the-scenes insight!
@johnonolan Great! Three features I'd love to see in order of importance.
1. A quick process for subscribers to add the podcast to their podcast player of choice. (https://www.supercast.com/ does this really well)
2. Unique podcast url for each paid subscriber (meaning if they cancel their subscription, they lose access)
3. The ability to see if one subscriber's url is being used on tons of devices ~20+... to catch if people share their url on Reddit or whatever.
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