The Story So Far
In late 2012, John O"Nolan put together a post with some wireframes about his idea for a new blogging platform. After years of frustration building blogs with existing solutions, he wrote a concept for a fictional platform that would be once more about online publishing rather than building complex websites. After a few hundred thousand pageviews in the space of a few days, he realised that other people were looking for the same thing. Six months later, after many hours of hard work, Ghost was revealed the public for the first time on Kickstarter. It raised more than $100,000 in the first 48 hours of funding, and went on to triple that figure within its 29 day funding period. Having brought on Hannah Wolfe as the development lead for the project, the Ghost prototype received more attention than ever before as people finally saw the platform in action.
Ghost is a platform dedicated to one thing: Publishing. It"s beautifully designed, completely customizable and completely Open Source. Ghost allows you to write and publish your own blog, giving you the tools to make it easy and even fun to do. It"s simple, elegant, and designed so that you can spend less time messing with making your blog work - and more time blogging.
Ghost has a smart writing screen. Markdown on the left, and a live preview on the right. Write down your ideas and format them on the fly, never pausing to click on endless formatting buttons, never having to write long/painful HTML to express your ideas. You can even theme the preview pane to match your blog"s formatting exactly.
Ghost grabs all the important data about your blog and pulls it into one place, so you can see it all together. No more clicking through tens of browser tabs to view your traffic, social media subscriptions, content performance or news feeds. Drag and drop the widgets most important to you into your own custom dashboard, and stay on top of your blog"s performance.
Ghost does something ridiculously simple when it comes to your content. It lets you browse and preview you all your stuff within a single view, just like you"re already used to with your email. Save time, save energy, browse and manage your content without over-click syndrome.
Ghost is Open Source, and it"s all yours. You can write themes for it so your blog can have its own design. You can write plugins for it to add your own functionality. You can host it on your laptop, or you can host it on a public server. The code is open, and so is the MIT license. No restrictions.
Ghost is currently available for Mac, Windows and Linux. If you"ve already decided to deploy Ghost to your server or hosting account, that"s great news! The Ghost documentation will walk you through various options for deploying Ghost, from manual setups, to one-click installers.