Looks nice. Hate to shit on their sandwich, but the main question I'm asking is "why would I use this and not Wordpress?"
- Wordpress has become a over-convoluted behemoth, with a needlessly complex structure that is not overly extensible. It is a pain to develop for/with/around.
I think everyone can appreciate the very tangible effect that Wordpress has had on the web. However, it is currently in the rather painful throws of a transition from blogging platform to CMS, and has been for quite some time.
There are number of other reasons:
- You want to avoid PHP.
- You don't need most of the feature bloat that comes along with Wordpress.
- You want to use Markdown.
- You want to try something different.
Then again, Markdown would be neat to work with, but in the end I'd just rather use html if I need to markup something. And I do like trying new things.
I have also built tooling, plugins & themes for wordpress. I personally found it to be a frustrating experience: like I had been lobbed back to the days of PHP 4 when I thought all the PHP haters might have had a point (I wish to be emphatic - I don't think this anymore).
From a development perspective:
- The "loop" is bad design - with no regard for separation of concerns and maintainability.
- The lack of namespacing means you have to go through a dance, working around Wordpress's idiosyncratic structure, in order to build around Wordpress effectively.
- I personally don't think much of their documentation.
You say "SO many reasons", but at best you have 4, of which only one seems to hold any weight. Avoiding PHP is not something the average blogger would care about, bloat = features and most normal people like features, trying something different is woolly at best, which leaves wanting to use markdown. Do that many people really want to use markdown?
Are you 100% sure this isn't just an anti thing like anti MS, anti facebook, and now anti wordpress?
Wordpress used to be that but it's turned into a huge CMS that's trying to do 2000 things at once. Jack of all trades and master of none if you will.
Wordpress isn't? Unless things have changed you install it and start adding blog posts.
That's what ghost is. It's a blogging system without all the added bloat and horrible API's to go with it.
???
1) Log into admin area (usually /wp-admin)
2) Click "Posts" on left sidebar (first icon on the top)
3) Write
4) Submit
What do you mean by "setup and run"? The work setup is extremely elastic. WP is setup and run. So is a particle accelerator, as is a fridge.
You mean being anti things that you have very good reasons for being anti? I suppose it is like that.
And, really, is it not clear Im implying that there is a lack of good reason, and that this all sounds like a knee jerk hate thing?
Really, so far, there is no positive reason to use this except some people like the idea of something with less features.
Seriously, what is so good about this? Remember I started by asking what the "So many reasons" are, and so far people are simply saying that its not WP, which was one of the 4 given already.
Hardly a ringing endorsement. Right now, use WP. In the future you might want the extra features, right?
Wordpress is a fine product. I've used it in the past. It's complete overkill for what I want to do with it. They want to become a CMS - that's fine, but I wouldn't run a simple blog on Wordpress any more than I'd run it on Joomla or *Nuke or Drupal.
I want a space to write that supports markdown, looks decent, isn't PHP (an objectively terrible language that I have no desire to seriously learn), and is light enough to run on my microserver.
Yes, of course it was clear. Since my post wasn't, I'll state it more clearly: I found it highly amusing that when trying to think of companies that no-one would have a reason to dislike, you chose Microsoft and Facebook.
Simply using their products would provide a few pages to start with :-)
You couldn't possible be claiming that the Wordpress interface is the pinnacle of UX research and advancements. Its fine. Just fine.
You mention that bloggers won't care about platform choice, feature bloat or trying something new. Fair enough. Something bloggers would care about is blogging.
Ghost is a simple, focused, blogging platform which is entirely focused on this purpose. As a victim of it's own success, this is not something Wordpress can reasonably claim to be any longer.
Wordpress is a full blown CMS, a title which comes with it's own set of advantages and disadvantages.
I would argue that there is room in the market for both the "Jack-of-all-trades" approach, and the focused, "bare-bones", approach.
Furthermore - my comment was initially in response to an assertion that there were no reasons to be excited about Ghost. I would suggest that, even if they are not reasons you care about, this is untrue.
At the end of the day it comes down to a personal choice of tools. I need a screwdriver; sure, I could use my pen-knife (which also has a torch, bread knife & tweezers), but it might be slower / more fiddly; or I could use a screwdriver.
Wordpress isn't the right tool for me anymore.
You claimed "SO many reasons", which implies lots and lots of reasons, especially with "SO" in capitals, but you you only listed 4, most of which IMHO were weak, and really only there to puff up the main reason which is that you don't like WP. In fact, in this new tact of yours, you just go on to criticism WP.
But, all you can say to sell this product is that is has less features than WP, and, well, its not WP. But WP works, and works well. So, unless one has a huge problem with WP, which millions of users seem not to have, I'm still don't see much of an answer to the OP's original question, "why should I use this and not WP?"
And of course its personal choice. There are already many alternatives already out there to WP. Most of them as light as this product is, there for already filling the gap for something bare bones. Yet, people make that personal choice to use WP, in their millions.
One big reason people would go for feature rich WP is future proofing. Would be a bit of a mare to use this, then discover you needed more features in the future and have to ditch it for WP, or similar. On top of that the massive user base gives rise to a massive amount of support knowledge. Always a comfort.
Finally, I have to say, if a hacker type in the web business wants something bare bones, what one earth is one doing with blogging software at all? Surely bare bones would be straight HTML with a sniff of CSS? Don't even need a database, and let evil google do the searching. In is most basic form, blogs are just blocks of text linked up. Im pretty sure most people here could rattle up a serviceable blog site in less than a day. I know I could, and I'm crap.
You know, well done to the people who did the work and what not, but Im not seeing any massive positive reason to use it over WP. In fact, in some ways I see it as a risk. What if I want to expand in the future, and this simply cant have the same level of support information. Which is a shame.
Good marketing showing how to solve problems most perceive they have...
I use PHP extensively and think it has come a hell of a long way over the last couple of years. My meaning with the orignal point of "avoiding PHP" was more in the spirit of platform considerations.
You may, for whatever reason, not want to include PHP as part of your system architecture. By being written in JS, Ghost offers an alternative in terms of platform (where something like Drupal, or Dropplets would not).
The problem I have is why on earth is this an important feature set?
> You may, for whatever reason, not want to include PHP as part of your system architecture.
But why? why? why? Why it does it matter if it's called PHP or JavaScript or GabeSpeek (made up). As long it works and it's maintainable, why on earth does this make any rational person's (not saying you specifically) list of features?
So it is down to network effects. Everyone knows Wordpress and the famous five minute install.
If Ghost is easy to theme and the templates easier to read / build / maintain then that's a big plus for me. I may not want to touch any code on the thing, but I would certainly want to do work on the templates.