I recently migrated off of WordPress and onto Ghost. The migration was flawlessly executed. Customer service is amazing, and my website is not only beautiful but screaming fast. The creator community is awesome and I’m learning so many new things about how to build a publication and community using best practices. What can I say, I’m in love. It’s well-supported and fundamentally sound.
We've been using ghost for over 2 years now and we regret the lockin. It does a lot and does many things well but even more so it does a lot of things very badly:
- The mariadb support drop was a major complication.
- The codebase is amateur with a lot of todo comments, non functional areas and
- The admin API is very limited, meaning you have to reverse engineer backend API yourself to do more complex tasks.
- The front end is slow and very difficult to extend. Theming is a real mess with a lot of hard coded areas that require very awkward patching.
The front-end is making any long-term support almost impossible:
- There's no version control for articles. There's no individual article backup for implementing your own version control and automation. The admin API is there but it's very difficult to use.
- There's no way to extend or modify UI. For example there's no mass modification, tagging or any advance features that you'd expect from a long-term CMS.
- It's really slow and most components are not compatible with the modern web. There's no predictable media naming for lazy preloading and other small issues that severely damages SEO potential.
Honestly, the value provided by Ghost is overshadowed by things that are just broken or badly designed. We regret basing our project on it.
I'm quite confused to see this comment posted in November 2023, because it sounds like you're maybe using a very old version of Ghost that's about 7 years out of date? If you update to the latest version I think you'd find that almost all of the points you mentioned have already been fixed, added or improved :)
Ghost makes publishing content incredibly easy and comes with solid tooling, open source and truly enterprise grade, you can run a real news website on Ghost and it shows, also it's very pretty, stable and secure especially if compared to Wordpress.
Great platform but comes with limitation. Sending newsletter emails is strictly limited to MailGun. It's hard for new bloggers/publishers who don't use MailGun. Mailgun allows only 10/day for a new account, then you need to fix the email sending batch "in the code".
A tool of great value. Templates allow for quick launch of blog or newsletters. Documentation is available and makes it easy to review, add, create and adjust current newsletter.
everything is brilliant. but one major drawback is dropdown menus/easy way to create a glossary/index. and setting up SPF/Dmarc to add a custom email sender
Hey Ben! We added full support for DMARC at the end of 2023, and we've always had support for SPF :)
Not sure what you mean RE dropdowns/index - could you share more? Would love to understand
