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Ghost blogging platform 1.0 RC1
Considering starting a small personal blog and re-visited Ghost as a simple CMS. Seems that 1.0 is eminent with a ghost-cli tool.. https://dev.ghost.org/ghost-1-0-0-rc-1/
Anyone using the 1.0 RC yet?
There was some talk about Ghost auto install being badly executed..Is Ghost still being badly installed via Softaculous?
Would like some thoughts on the platform before I go all in :P
Comments
I presently do not run any Ghost blogs. However, I really liked their admin UI and have been following the development of 1.0.
The editor they initially planned to use in 1.0 was pretty horrible. I absolutely loathed it and thought the original design with the split-pane Markdown/preview was a lot better. They've (temporarily?) abandoned that editor and compromised on a single-pane editor that supports Markdown but displays the markup (e.g. text that is **bolded** appears like this parenthetical). I think it's a good choice and part of me hopes they keep it as I really like Markdown.
The rest of the UI is pretty much identical from what I can tell, at least in the grande appearance. They've introduced some new things like the public API being on by default, dark mode, better support for bringing in images, etc.
The Casper 2.0 theme is nice. Much less bland than its previous iteration. I prefer the old one only because it was more of a traditional blog-like design (but I mostly deal with heavy-word posts that lack images). I think many will like the new theme. Of course there are many other themes you can use and templating is pretty straight-forward if you've done anything like that before.
The Ghost CLI is absolutely awesome. Way easier to get a blog installed and running. Also makes installing multiple blogs easier. It sets up systemd services, etc. for you. Fantastic. Really.
My biggest gripe (and it's pretty much a deal-breaker at this point) is the memory footprint. I installed 1.0 RC 1 and between ghost and nodejs it was using close to 250 MB of RAM. That's without me doing anything. At all. Nothing. It doesn't include MySQL, either; which is the default storage (though you can do sqlite if you want). Compare that to a WordPress install with PHP-FPM (using opcache to share some memory), it uses <40 MB out of the box. That's a pretty big difference.
Still, if you have the resources, go for it once it hits 1.0. I plan to set one up myself at some point as I genuinely like the software and want to keep up with its development.
You can probably reduce that considerably. The V8 runtime by default is pretty greedy with RAM, preferring retaining allocations over garbage-collecting (for performance reasons), but if you reduce the threshold where it starts garbage-collecting (or even limit its maximum heap size entirely!), you can get the memory usage way down, probably even under 64MB. Have a look at
node --v8-options | grep space_size.That's really not a good comparison, though. PHP creates an entire new execution context for every single request; which means that the 40MB it does use are just for the PHP runtime and maybe some caches, but it contains zero live application code. The tradeoff here is that pageloads are much, much slower (since it needs to reinitialize the entire application on every pageload), you often end up wasting system resources (eg. connections to the database), and it uses far more RAM under load.
In Node.js - and basically every other non-PHP thing - on the other hand, you have a single application context that gets initialized once and then reused for every request. The per-pageload overhead is close to zero, no per-pageload initialization is required, and under load the memory usage will be way lower.
EDIT: More details about the difference in execution model here.
Good to know.
Yeah. I get what you're saying. It is my opinion that the majority of web sites are not really going to be under heavy load so I'm not sure how much this really becomes an issue. You are correct though and certainly something like WordPress does not scale well right out of the box, but out of the box it does run light and fast (assuming the operator is not an idiot loading it with crap themes and plugins).
Thanks for your comments; great insight.
Yet to see that dashboard we were promised in the kickstarter campaign
Damn. I liked the original markdown dual panel too. Shall spin up a 1.0 later today to have a look.
Too busy with their hosted solution. 8-|
Agreed. It was perfect, IMHO.
Even then it'll always run slower than something written in Node/Python/etc. that does equivalent work, though; that's just an unavoidable consequence of having to reinitialize the entire application on every request, which is inherent to how PHP is designed. And even with a single Googlebot hitting your site you've already lost the resource usage advantage of "don't initialize the application upfront"...
Modern PHP versions use built-in opcode caching out of the box (although it certainly doesn't hurt to tune it properly), so what you are saying about reinitialization of the entire PHP application is not correct anymore.
@M66B opcode caching is compilation not initialization
However as someone who does extensive development in a variety of technologies including NodeJS and PHP it's really a moot point. Rarely does the performance of initialization actually matter. Build or Deploy with whatever suits you the best and be done with it.
IMHO:
NodeJS is great for doing some really advanced stuff simply, websockets and things that go beyond typical web serving.
PHP is great for it's simplicity for your standard request/response stuff. Combined with a long history and low barrier of entry.
But that's just my 2c, go form your own.
https://dev.ghost.org/ghost-1-0-0/
Seems 1.0 proper is released
https://blog.ghost.org/1-0/
That was canned and explained why long time ago.
Have a link to the explanation?
https://blog.ghost.org/year-2/
There's always a flatfile CMS like Grav to make a 'blog' fly .
I'm not a ghost fan but at least they came clean on that. "We wanted to do it, it was a lot more complicated than we thought, we did all this other stuff, we're going to let that one go because there are some great alternatives". Even if I was a kickstarter backer, I could live with that.
agree
The bottom line with Ghost is that due to the high price for their hosted service and the complexity for the average customer to self-host, it is for the niche, not mass market.
O'Nolan discussed in another post that they are focussed on the corporate market who will pay more than trying to attract the Joe Bloggs user. His rationale was that the market for self-hosted blogs is just not there anymore.
I disagree, it comes back to the complexity to self-host Ghost that keeps people away.
Not really sure where Ghost is going in the long term.
I haven't used Ghost so I have no first-hand experience with this, but where's the complexity in self-hosting it? Node.js applications are typically pretty simple to get going (in part because they don't use system-wide dependencies), so I wonder where the issue stems from here.
It's pretty easy, especially with their ghost-cli tool right now.
However they've been a mess on softaculous.. On https://blog.ghost.org/1-0/ they mentioned
I am talking about the average non-technical user here, the ones that use Wordpress due to its simplicity to get up and running. They are the people who make blogging software popular, rightly or wrongly.
They don't care what Node.js is or want to know how to use it, they just want to click, install and use.
Sure there are one click installers with the likes of DO but again, the mass market are not going to learn how to use a VPS, Linux, and so on just to create a blog.
That's a provider problem, though, not a software problem. It doesn't make it any more complex to self-host; it just means the one-click button isn't there for it in hosting panels (yet). Nothing Ghost can do about that.
koff koff
JavaScript as a service will so catch on outside of the millennials.
Perhaps @Lee is saying that Wordpress has a Wordpress.com solution where people can spin up free blogs but this is not present in Ghost. Wordpress.com does reduce the barrier of entry for your average blogger quite significantly.
Of course, never said it's a software issue, however for the average blogger that is their perception. They need to pay $29 per month for the hosted offering ($19 if you commit annually) or learn to manage a VPS in order to self-host. The former is in no way appealing to a new user, the latter is not appealing to the majority.
Compare that with Wordpress where the cost of entry is virtually nothing either hosting it yourself (cPanel) or through wordpress.com and you see why Ghost has royally failed to capitalise. After all, it was the direction that Wordpress was going in that O'Nolan wanted to address with Ghost to deliver a truly stylish but solely blogging platform. And it is living up to that in many ways.
They know the issue, hence they openly stated their direction was corporate, not the general consumer as they could not entice enough of them away from Wordpress in the numbers originally anticipated. And you never will with a platform that lacks the basics like a search facility, apps and so on.
I like Ghost and use it, for a writer it really does break down a lot of barriers that Wordpress and others create. A long way to go though. Unfortunately, I have been saying that for 2 years.
What are your thoughts about ghost two years later?
Can it match WP for the average blogger?
Well, my thoughts are that back in the days things used to be a lot more cheerful.
Now it's all about eating cakes and who got more cake to eat.
It sickens me, but one teaspoon at a time...
Switch to HUGO(gohugo.io)
It's great.
Two years on since my last post above there has been changes.
There is a command line installer, it is certainly easier to self-host now. They have a clear guide on how to do it but you still need to manage your own VPS which will put people off.
It remains a very well thought out and clean application if all you need is a blog.
For 4 years they have been promising apps, but it appears to have been too complex for them. The solution is this, Integrations. A few work straight from the control panel, but in the main, they are manual integrations. Again, not for the non-tech. Maybe @joepie91 can chime in on the difficulties of apps, he is the node.js guy.
The editor has been changed a couple of times, I preferred using markdown but the new one is ok.
Ups and downs really. For a serious blogger, I would recommend it, but you need technical skill and patience to really make it work for you unless you deal with the vanilla theme and stock application.