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Comment by johnonolan | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN John from Ghost here. Excited to launch 5.0 today, 9 years after Ghost first got built thanks to a popular post right here on Hacker News. We're hanging out in the comments today if you have any questions or thoughts!

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Off-topic: I really liked the previous homepage you had instead.

I completely realize that the copy is largely the same (which you have amazingly good copy), but I think you're confusing the potential buyer by having an Analytics Dashboard as your hero image.

You're not an analytics product. You're a publishing platform making it easy for people to make a livelihood using your platform. As such, the hero image should be about that person and/or publishing ... not about clicks and page views.

Agreed. I've never heard of Ghost, but my thought process was roughly this as I read the article (Based on comments here, I think most of my conclusions were wrong):

- Oh, an editor that's somehow optimized for professional flows. Maybe that's worth learning.

- Nope, wait. This is an analytics product for people with lots of readers. Meh. ...vague privacy concerns...

- Looks like a "call to ask for pricing" model or something.

- I wonder if this supports RSS, or if it'll break my reading flow if it catches on. (Scroll down, see there's no rss icon). Nope. Back button.

Anyway, congrats on the 5.0 release!

(Please take this as constructive criticism, and note that I'm not your target audience!.)

Same. Someone recommended Ghost to me for my blog, went on the site and immediately "hmm, this doesn't look like a blogging platform..." Took me a couple tries to dive below the slick marketing speak to find that it is, in fact, a publishing framework.

Do you still wish you had written Ghost in Laravel/PHP like you mentioned on the SE Daily podcast back in 2018?

Reference: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31478649

Would you consider adding support for PostgreSQL instead of just MySQL. I realize that it can greatly complicate things, but PostgreSQL is generally a much better DB.

This is answered in some detail in the post :) Ghost uses Knex and Bookshelf, and can work with any database that is fully supported and made interoperable by those packages. So if anyone contributes to the upstream repositories, the Postgres will work automatically. The core Ghost team focuses on MySQL because we're a small team and we can only really have the resources to document and support one environment properly.

Congrats on the 5.0 launch! A few questions below...(thanks)

Back in 2013, Ghost was promoted as just a blogging tool. In contrast, WordPress had become a general publishing tool i.e. a blog, a CMS, an e-commerce store, any type of website (portfolio, news website, etc.) Fast-forward today and Ghost is also a general publishing tool that can do many of the things WordPress does.

How do you see Ghost vs WordPress today? Is it fair to say that Ghost today has become what WordPress is (i.e. a publishing tool covering the same use cases as WordPress)? Or is Ghost's scope more narrow than WordPress?

I mean I kind of wrote 2,000 words answering this in the post that these comments are about. We've always been focused on a single core usecase: Publishing, and that is still true today. WordPress diverted away from blogging and became a tool for building general websites, ecommerce stores, job boards, real estate listings, social networks (bbpress), enterprise tools (altis), and even full blown applications. In terms of diversity of usecase, you really can't beat WP for how many different things it can do.

Ghost's scope has grown significantly relative to Ghost, but - as I outlined in the post in some detail - our target usecase for the platform has remained pretty consistent, and far narrower by comparison.

All that being said: Apps have to evolve with the market, and Ghost is no exception. It's no use making something and then never changing it, because the world around it doesn't stand still.

This might be a little more out there as a question, but what's your take on future trends and web technologies ? Static vs Dynamic Sites? Will AI/Machine Learning outmode the need for CMSs/platforms Ghost or Wordpress? Are Javascript and its derivatives here to stay or does Rust or some other language have a chance at taking the crown?

i have a couple questions:

does Ghost still depend on jQuery?

do you consider adding server-side code highlighting?

do you consider supporting other mail options other than Mailgun?

i'd love to start a mailing list with Ghost but those issues keep me from it

otherwise i'm always looking out for Ghost and you've made amazing progress so far over the years!

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