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Ghost 3.0 β A new business model for publishing
A new business model for publishing, a more powerful headless CMS and a refined publishing experience.
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@levelsio Not the easiest migration I've ever done Piet - your WP theme was very "creative"
@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?
@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.
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!
John- This is awesome and super timely. I recently was speaking with a startup that was using Contentful that was "pre-business model" and think this is a far better choice...
π Hey Product Hunters!
After 6 years, I'm super excited to share Ghost 3.0 with you β 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.
π» 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, thereβs still not a single other platform which offers all those things in one place!
π 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.
π¨βπ©βπ§βπ§ Ghost now includes native support for memberships, turn your anonymous pageviews into registered users who are part of a community
πΈ 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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π 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.
π A huge amount of new integrations for all your favourite products and services with Ghost
βοΈ 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)
π’ 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 Congrats on the fast improvements from 1.X -> 2.0 -> 3.0. The last two releases are really exciting!
@alexwelcing Really appreciate it! Feels like we've come a long way since 1.x already
@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.
Really love this @johnonolan! Will this work for putting podcasts behind a paywall as well?
@timothybucksf Absolutely :) had a few requests about this already, so we're also looking at if there's any more we can do in this space
@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.
@timothybucksf Great notes! I've heard a lot of good things about supercast lately
Started a new blog on Ghost this year and really love it, planning a side project on it and Congrats for the new 3.0 release !
Ghost seems like a great platform. Honestly my biggest reason I think I will choose Hugo is speed of cranking pages when dealing with a large website. Please prove me wrong.
It's bee so great watching Ghost grow over the past 6 years, massive congratulations to @johnonolan and the Ghost team for building an amazing product. Keep up the great work!
Congrats on the v3 launch Ghost team! Looking stellar as always and that membership recurring income slider is π₯
ps. just signed up at Rediverge - looking forward to the good behind-the-scenes insight!
@robhope you're a gentleman and a scholar, thank you so much for the support <3
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.
Great work, John and team, is subscription immediately available for hosted customers?
@erwblo Yes! It's available immediately for both self hosted and hosted customers
Wow! You are giving anyone the power to monetize their written work, and potentially become financially independent from it. What could be more meaningful?
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 ;-)
@johnonolan - awesome. this list may help https://checkout.fyi/. Paypal works most places, or there is a work around.
Huge congrats on the launch! You're a real inspiration. We've had a great time building themes for Ghost (https://t2themes.com) and use it on all of our personal and company blogs as well π
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.
Excited about the direction here @johnonolan! Early sort of lurker here, I'm observing every step ever since the kickstarter :) Will definitely check in on the new features.
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