10 minutes with Ghost blogging platform: looks promising!

WordPress’ performance frustrates me sometimes, and Ghost received some good attention a while back. Time to take a look at Ghost!

First Impressions

really easy to install for dev purposes. It can run with SQLite, no need to set up a database server
it runs fast!
I like the Markdown editor
creating apps and themes looks simple compared to WordPress
the WordPress exporter for moving posts into Ghost works most of the time

But it’s still missing WordPress features I rely on:

Post revisions
Searching for posts in admin area
Automatically embedding YouTube videos & Meetup info from URLs (oembed?) http://en.support.wordpress.com/videos/youtube/

Thoughts

I will give Ghost another try when I have time to look at the entire ecosystem and see what add-ons are out there, or if I can add the features I want. I appreciate that a fresh install of Ghost is fast and light, and hopefully adding some features I like will not slow it down much.

The good news is the team is very open about progress and changes. Here’s a blog post about what’s happening now, and here’s the Ghost roadmap on Trello.

What would moving from WordPress to Ghost be like?

easy to import most WP post text with a WP plugin, but I did see some errors when moving JS embedded in WP posts into Ghost
Ghost should be able to use the same URLs for posts as WP
images in posts will have to be moved to another host like S3. The Ghost team recommends Cloudinary to automate that process
could host site on Heroku, Digital Ocean, or another VPS provider. Not shared hosting