Ask HN: Which platform do you prefer and why, Ghost or Pelican? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Which platform do you prefer and why, Ghost or Pelican?

10 pointsmilkers6 comments

I am going to move my blog and want to start with something more fresh. If you had made that choice before I want to hear your story.

View on HN

I have blogs using both!

I went with Pelican before ghost came out to get off of Wordpress. I was tired of the constant security updates enough to try and migrate to something else. My first requirement was that it was able to import Wordpress content which Pelican had.

However, Pelican's wordpress importer was "bare-bones" to say the least and still is. I fixed it so that it at least preserves formatting (by translating Wordpress' insane parser thing for its own post format line by line). It won't preserve things like image links and stuff (or at least I didn't get to that part).

I'm still not a huge fan of it one way or the other but it does its job I guess. Development is fast and furious though and I haven't updated in forever. So ymmv there.

As for Ghost... same problems as Wordpress and harder to self-host by orders of magnitude. It has a catchy admin interface. Designers love this platform so finding a good template is pretty easy compared to Pelican (I had to write my own... again not as much fun as it sounds).

The bonus of both platforms is that they both parse markdown for post content so dipping your toes in and trying something else shouldn't be too painful.

Ghost has the same problems as WordPress? That's extremely hard to believe, since there is no way that Ghost is made out of ancient, often questionable PHP code that you have to interact with to get anything significant done.

I meant the specific problems I was having with Wordpress: hosted, dynamic pages and constant upgrades. As Ghost gains popularity it will just become another target for spammers and will require constant vigilance to protect your blog if you're self-hosting.

Update: fixed an unclear anaphora.

Recently, I started using Ghost as personal note journal on my Mac. I reviewed several non-Wordpress self-hosted platforms and finally decided to test Ghost. Ghost was easy to setup, there are a few free good themes that you can use or create/ customize your own. I really like the markdown editor. It allows you to use markdown as well as HTML. Most of the time I use the editor to write my notes. Sometime I will use Mou to write, export to HTML and paste in the markdown editor. I believe Ghost platform is growing and has momentum so hopefully it will have more features like scheduled posts, tagging, comments etc.

I also run a web service on a LAMP stack. Initially I thought about using Ghost for blogging but due to complexity and lack of information on running Apache with SSL and Nodejs on same server decided to wait.

Ghost is nice, but it doesn't quite fill the same niche. Its ease of use comes from its dynamic parts like the editor. Certainly can't use those if I only want static output without some steps inbetween and especially not if the server doesn't run any interpreter.

I hadn't actually heard of Pelican until now but it looks like Ghost and Pelican aren't really comparable - they're two very different approaches to a blogging platform. Pelican looks more comparable to Jekyll.

Personally I've just moved to Ghost and I have to say that I love it. I wrote a longish post [1] on all the blogging platforms I've tried and how Ghost compares. The post also explains why I didn't go with something like Jekyll. Check it out, it might help.

[1] http://mehdi.me/ghost-io-the-first-blogging-platform-that-ma...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com