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Comment by jnardiello | Hacker News Reader

There's a lot of buzz around Ghost and it's becoming the primary choice for a lot of people. When i had to choose which platform to use for my personal website i gave it a try and spent quite some time playing with it. After a couple of months: i'm switching to Jekyll.

Ghost is indeed a great platform and i consider it "Wordpress with superpowers". Yet, exactly like Wordpress, i consider this a huge commercial machine with the usual themes frenzy and marketplaces/agencies chasing customers. And i personally deeply dislike it as it's far from pushing a healthy dev environment.

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I dispute the idea of it being a "huge commercial machine" just because people are creating themes for it and charging money for them. It's a blogging platform that has support from an ecosystem that builds themes—which is arguably a requirement for any modern blogging platform that wants to draw in regular (read: non-tech-oriented) users.

The average user wants a nice-looking site without a lot of work. Ghost wants to market itself to regular users. It just seems like common sense that they'd get theme-makers on board—especially since it played such a huge role in the growth of Tumblr and WordPress, respectively.

It's pretty easy to ignore and gets people excited about the potential here, and considering that Ghost is so new, I don't think anyone is getting rich off of it right off the bat.

It's seriously harmless and arguably healthy that people are interested in spending time creating themes for such a young platform already.

It is rather "Wordpress without superpowers"

I'll likely never use Ghost, whatwith already having put time into a nominal Wordpress site and using Jekyll or Middleman for everything else...but I hope it succeeds. The fact that it's spreading Markdown as the default writing syntax to people who were halfway dependent on turnkey Wordpress solutions and used only WYSIWYG...to me, that's a win overall for digital literacy.

Could you care to explain why exactly you dislike an open source development effort with commercial elements, such as theme/module marketplaces?

And what about Ghost ecosystem that is far from a healthy dev environment?

Check out http://wintersmith.io/ if you're into static site generators. Not affiliated, just a fan.

I switched to Jekyll, too, but mostly because it means that I don't have to stay on top of security updates. When I'm serving static content that changes a few dozen times per year, interpreted web-facing server-side code is a liability. I still have fears that I have an unpatched Wordpress install sitting on a server that I care about somewhere.

I write my posts in Markdown, commit, push, and it's published. Doesn't get much easier than that.

>Ghost is indeed a great platform and i consider it "Wordpress with superpowers".

I am wondering about this. I tried Ghost a few months ago, when digitial ocean was offering a free couple months if you tried it. I used it for a little bit, and found it much, much worse than wordpress for even simple blogging. I really like the ability to change things around easily if I don't like them.

What did I miss?

> What did I miss?

That it is still an alpha version you're using?

On the Kickstarter page [1] it's stated that it will be customizable and will support plugins. So give it some time I'd say.

[1]: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/johnonolan/ghost-just-a-...

Okay so the functionality definitely isn't there yet. Just planned. That definitely doesn't qualify it as "wordpress with superpowers." It's just a blogging platform with aspirations at this point.

> Yet, exactly like Wordpress, i consider this a huge commercial machine

Ghost itself is produced by a nonprofit organization. Though I suppose the surrounding ecosystem may eventually be just as commercial as that of Wordpress, the main Ghost developers have the explicit goal of not getting corrupted by money.

Wordpress don't allow non-GPL themes and plugins in their directories, there was an entire dragged-out debate about it. That is about as far away from "corrupted by money" as it gets.

Wordpress is the victim of being popular.

You have a decent point here.

Urgh. What is the exact meaning of that "corruption" you are speaking about?

To paraphrase John O'Nolan in his original Kickstarter video for Ghost, Ghost is designed for users, not to please investors or potential acquirers. You can hear the original here: https://ghost.org/features/ starting around 2:05 in the video.

That is absolutely irrelevant to the corruption claims of OP and doesnt answer my question.

But I am OP. That's what I meant when I wrote corruption-- the idea that a nonprofit will be more user-focused since they can't be acquisition-focused, since they're not an acquisition target.

Well, ok then. In general user value and investor value are orthogonal to each other. In closed-source, proprietory, vendor locked-in products there is a conflict of interests between value for investors and value for users. I just don't see this conflict in open source software, it happens, but rarely.

Wounder how this would be a "wordpress with superpowers" since wordpress is in 3.8 and this is only 0.4.

Are you seriously comparing the version numbers of two completely different applications? That's like saying Apache is twice as good as Nginx because Apache is on version 2.4 and Nginx is only on 1.5.

They are not completely different, they were made for a purpose(blogging), and the fact that Ghost was something that appear recently which is why it base features are things that the trend of today doesn't mean that suddenly a well stable project like WP can't whole a candle to it.

Yeah, we all love new a shiny things, but that doesn't mean that at the moment that they appear they will going to be better that well established tools like WP. As i wrote before WP is at 3.8(pretty stable) and Ghost at 0.4(early alpha) the numbers never lie. But don't get me wrong, i would like Ghost to success but still needs more time.

You sound (rightly) incredulous, but don't forget that dBASE II launched at version 2 because 2 is better than 1.

Bigger numbers means its better. It's science bro.

Could you summarize some of the "superpowers"?

It's clean (for now).

Wordpress with superpowers? I use Ghost, and while I like it and plan to stick with it for the time being, I have no clue as to these "superpowers" are you elude to.

Can you clarify?

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