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Comment by coldtea | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, because their huge market position (or the Kickstarter money) guarantee them being able to hit a 10+ year old project which powers 40% of the web, and has a multi-million dollar company behind it.

Shame of them for not delivering magical unicors sprinkled with pixie dust.

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If they promised magical unicorns, then yes, shame on them.

I was not expecting them to take on WP even in a 5 year time but I was hoping to see them grow and chip away at WP's market share and reach 20% - 30% by of the blogging platform market but two years in and Ghost still going nowhere in terms of adoption and even worse it lags behind feature-wise.

So yeah I'm really disappointed at them and equally at Assemble as well but Ghost is supposed to have had better chances of making it since they are well funded and have/had the support of the JS community to build a decent node-powered blogging platform that takes the market by storm but this yet is to materialize.

have you considered that maybe the market doesn't want a "decent node-powered blogging platform?"

Building a quality product takes time, and often times a lot longer than you think it will take. Lots of things get in the way, and with a product like this, education is a huge part of the adoption cycle. At 500k/year, they are poised to have healthy growth until they reach that point. Might not happen on your timeline, but at least they are still chugging.

Here's the real issue. WordPress is more than a blog. Ghost is only attacking the blogging aspect of WordPress. The rich themes and plugins ecosystem of WordPress cannot be matched no matter WHAT anyone thinks. Because of this, WordPress is widely used to develop all kinds of sites.

Hell there's a company in my area (sadly I worked there years ago) who literally manages 200+ local businesses sites and they're all powered by WordPress. I'd say 1 or 2 of them are actually blog having sites. The rest are just "I want to be able to edit this section of content myself" sites.

WordPress makes it insanely easy to build a site for a client or even anyone who's vaguely familiar with web development.

Go get a cheap shared hosting account, click that 1 click WP install button, login to your new site, search for a theme you like, install it in a click, make a few minor tweaks, find some plugins that do stuff you like, install them in a click. Done.

Until people realize this, there's no "taking on WordPress".

definitely. Not to mention WP's capability as an application platform. There are more PHP devs than node devs, and Ghost's adoption probably reflects that.

I think that the whole ecosystem piggybacking on WP can be matched if not surpassed. There's nothing deficient or lacking in the technologies used in a Node stack to pull this off.

We have npm already to cover the plugins functionality and on the front end it's a framework-a-palooza with libraries and themes popping every other hour.

So, it can be done and I believe it can be easier and simpler whether for the end user or the developer as developing for WP is not really a walk in the park and there's a lot of gotchas and magic involved in this daunting process.

The issue there is that the ecosystem is full of "I'd rather just install a plugin and be done" types. Nobody wants to recreate popular WordPress plugins to work in a NodeJS replacement.

"Why would I recreate this in NodeJS where nobody uses it, when I can just use WordPress?"

>reach 20% - 30% by of the blogging platform market

In 2 years? That's crazy talk. Why would that happen?

It's not as WordPress users have issues with it and are actively looking for alternatives. In fact they're more or less happy with it.

Ghost would only appeal to the more minimalist crowd, who cared that the source was cleaner etc (and I'm assuming it is, for it can also be just a jangled mess of JavaScript instead of PHP).

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