Ghost – Up and Running – What is Ghost?

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Ghost – Up and Running – What is Ghost?

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ghost-up-and-running

Short talk on Ghost

On Github mattfield / ghost-up-and-running

Ghost

Up and Running

  • Glad to be here!
  • Over next 10 mins or so, aim to introduce you to Ghost, recount its story and guiding purpose, and hopefully impart enough to get you up and running with it

Hi. I'm Matt.

Programmer.

Github: mattfield

Twitter: @mattfieldy

  • By means of a quick intro...
  • Slightly dorky picture...!
  • Programmer - primarily for the web

What is Ghost?

"Just a blogging platform"

  • Simply, Ghost is an application which allows you to write and publish

your own blog.

  • It's just a blogging platform.
  • Powerful mantra to have as a guilding principal,

particularly in an area of software that is rife

with complexity and hard-to-use/hard-to-understand interfaces and systems.

  • It's JUST a blogging platform. It does nothing else.

Puts nothing between you as the publisher and your content.

Free. Open-source. Simple to use.

Media publication for the masses.

  • It's completely free. You pay nothing to use the application.
  • It's open-source. The code is in a public repo on Github and downloadable from their site.
  • It's simple to use. Ghost hosts a very sleek, minimal interface that allows you to focus on your content without distraction. But more than that, it's very easy to set up. Spend less time making your blog work and more time blogging.
  • In their own words, it's "media publication for the masses."

Story behind Ghost

or "The Ghost Story"

  • To understand more about what Ghost is and where it fits into the bigger picture of blogging, it'd serve us well to look at where it came from and why. So: look at the story behind Ghost, or...the Ghost story

It started with a blog post

  • Rather appropriately, it all started with a blog post
  • Nov 2012 - John O'Nolan wrote a blog post about his idea of an ideal blogging platform: comprised mostly of a very minimal UI, nothing gets in the way of the publisher and their writing
  • The underlying purpose of the post: see whether bloggers were running into same frustrations and difficulties as he was

+1

  • Met with positive feedback
  • Set about building a WP plugin that would completely replace the WP admin section
  • Ambitious but a worthwhile goal. The first time I tried to set up a WP blog, knowing nothing about WP, and opened up the admin area for the first time...
  • Buttons and links and these things called widgets and a huge sidebar and...

If you build it...

* Work progressed towards this goal but they found themselves hitting the same technological and philsophical brick walls that stem from operating within and developing for an existing platform * So...they decided to build their own app * A prototype was finished and it went up on Kickstarter
  • Original goal of £25,000 was reached in just under 11 hours
  • After 4 weeks, nearly £200k and just over 5,200 backers

Not for profit

* The Ghost Foundation - not for profit org * Something that's very rare in the world of tech companies * No ownership, no investers, no stakeholders * Can't sell out, no "exit strategy" * No-one can use monetary influence to sway the course of the platform - every penny can only go towards Ghost. * Good news if you're worried about ever losing content or using a blogging platform that suddenly stops being maintained

Core tech

* Whistlestop tour of some of the core tech in Ghost
* Built in Node using the Express framework. Obvious decision for them to use a platform like Node for Ghost. * The plugin they had begun to build for WP was largely a client-side JS app - moving that to the server was a natural progression * But also wanted Ghost to be positioned as part of a vibrant open-source community that JS possesses
* Uses Handlebars as its templating system * Primarily to keep a clean separation between application logic and views * Makes development of themes a very clean and easy process - include bits of Handlebars where needed * Also means there's a much lower bar of entry to customisation - it's just HTML and CSS. No PHP involved.
* when.js library quite extensively - primarily a Promise-driven app
* For the DB: wanted to support SQL first and foremost, primarily SQLite * The reason for this is so that they could minimise the amount of setup needed to get going with Ghost - you can run `npm install ghost && npm start` and you're good to go; again, nothing between a writer and their content * Bookshelf: promise-based ORM for Node that extends Backbone's Models and Collections and handles the relationships between them * Knex: query and schema builder that handles all the heavy lifting.

Up and Running

localhost:2368

* Create an account on Ghost * Download the source code .zip folder * Run npm install with a production flag, npm start, you're good to go * Manually deploy to something like a cloud server on EC2, DigitalOcean, Rackspace, a VPS like Webfaction or Dreamhost or practically anything that has SSH access and will allow you to install Node (though unfortunately neither Nodejitsu nor Heroku currently compatible. Work at first...but then kill your database)

One-click installations

* One-click installations on Bitnami, Rackspace and DigitalOcean (which is actually the one I used, see in a minute)

Ghost hosted service

* Hosted service * Rolled out over Christmas * Pricing $5 a month for one blog, up to something like $80 a month for 30 blogs * There will be a cap on number of view per plan * BUT a way of looking at it is that the hosted plans will be the main source of funding for Ghost. It's a way of contributing to the project.

Live Demo!

* So that's a whistlestop tour of Ghost and it's interface. * Hopefully you'll go and check Ghost out for yourself

Thanks!

mattfield.github.io