Ghost Blogging Platform can now be used as a headless CMS | Hacker News Reader

Ghost Blogging Platform can now be used as a headless CMS

blog.ghost.org

19 pointskn87 comments

This is fantastic news, and I'll definitely be taking a look. I do want to point out, however, that there are a number of benefits to having your content in a Git-backed file repository, rather than in a centralized database.

I understand why Ghost would want to promote using a headless CMS with a database—it's great PR—but I hesitate recommending this as a slam-dunk solution. For me, generally speaking, all the sites I build now are JAMstack (Jekyll, with a custom Rails-based content editor), and having all the website content in a Git repo is a huge part of that workflow and a major selling point.

Take a look at our docs repo: https://github.com/TryGhost/docs, built with Ghost+GitHub+Gatsby.

All of our API docs are maintained by developers who are happiest in git and markdown - so those files live in GitHub, with the added benefit of being available for anyone to contribute to.

Meanwhile, our Ghost(Pro) documentation is maintained by our support team, and integrations & tutorials are maintained by our marketing team - all people who are happiest with the editor and workflows provided by Ghost.

The beauty of JAMstack is just how simple it is to combine multiple sources of data into a single site. Power, flexibility, and most of all choice.

We're not ramming Ghost down anyone's throat. If you don't like it - you really don't have to use it. The decoupling work we are doing intends to make it possible for people to pick and choose bits of Ghost that they do like, and use them however they want.

Hi HN! John from Ghost here - happy to answer any questions about this. We rebuilt our docs using Gatsby and the Ghost API last year and ended up liking it so much that we rearchitected everything to make the the JAMstack workflow a first class citizen :)

Hi John! Congrats on everything with Ghost. Is it possible to run Ghost locally and push a build out which is then deployed to S3, essentially removing the "hosting" aspect of things outside of S3?

Do you have any resources you can point to that explains like I'm 5 where Ghost ends and Gatsby starts? Most of my dev life lately has been CraftCMS and Laravel but I'm convinced that some variety of serverless is where everything is headed.

Thanks in advance!

Sure thing! I Gatsby generates static HTML files from 1 or more data sources, which can be a filesystem or an API. When a Gatsby build runs, as long as it can access the API in question, then it can pull the content needed to generate a build. Once that build is completed, the resulting directory can essentially just be dragged and dropped (literally, in the case of Netlify) onto a hosting platform.

You can absolutely run all of these things locally and have no code running in production at all, if that's what you want to do!

The benefit of having your content API in production is that it can be accessed from anywhere, by anything - which opens up a lot more usecases.

Best way to get a handle on it all is to play with the starter repo, which should be fairly easy to get up and running: https://github.com/tryghost/gatsby-starter-ghost

Awesome! Thanks for the info! Excited to try this out.

I love this, while the rest of the industry is focussing on coupling admin interfaces with the front end, Ghost's focus on decoupling is a no-brainer.

Incredible work!

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