Ask HN: Should I ditch Wordpress for Ghost? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Should I ditch Wordpress for Ghost?

9 pointsjagermo8 comments

Hi all, me again, I am in the process of switching my website provider and I am wondering: If I invest all that time I might also think about switching from Wordpress to Ghost [1].

Don't get me wrong, Wordpress is awesome and did a lot for bloggers. But its also a huge target and kind of bloated.

I really like Ghost, but I am not sure if it's ready to go yet. My posts are mostly text and pictures, that shouldn't be a problem (although I hear its not easy to migrate pictures).

My main concern are the plugins: I use few, but I want to keep stuff like the 2-click-social-media-share [2] or the Cookie warning (not sure if I need it, but hey...).

Basically, what I am asking: Did anyone switch his blog from WP to Ghost and how did it go?

Thanks for your time (currently in Greece, answers might take a while).

[1]: www.ghost.org [2]: https://github.com/heiseonline/shariff

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In my opinion, the answer depends on rephrasing the question.

If your question is "Should I ditch WP for Ghost for blogging only?", then the answer may be Yes.

But if your question is "Should I ditch WP for ghost and even though I am starting with a blog right now, I may need many additional features a.k.a Plugins in coming future", then the answer is Most likely No. It is hard to beat the maturity and ecosystem of WP functionality and plugins which is the biggest reason why WP is so popular.

Yes, I agree. But I try to have as few plugins as possible (since they give attackers a broader target, imho), so it might be possible to work around that.

I just switched to Ghost this weekend. Coming from WordPress, it wasn't 100% clear to me that there are no "plugins". It's pretty minimalist, which is good for me because I'm tired of being distracted. I just want to write.

I wrote a quick post on it, actually...

http://www.codysand.com/starting-over/

Wordpress is bloated but you don't have to bloat it.

I wouldn't switch because I don't have time to learn yet another blogging platform and be clueless when something blows up or go wrong.

"I just want to write" is a lie in 90%. Yes, you want to write. Then you want to put an ad or two. Then you want to sell ebook or two. Then you want to allow people to become members. Then you want to charge for premium blog posts. The list goes on.

Wordpress have free or commercial answers on these + on million more future requirements. Less known platforms are not that fast.

I host my own dedicated server with Cpanel that has 1-click wordpress install. I like that and charge people for that. Everyone is happy.

It might have been a limitation on my services or a misconfig on my part, but I have my ghost instance crash a couple of times, and was unable to recover it. I love the interface, but haven't reinstalled it until I could test it on another hosting platform. I think it is a quick and simple way to get setup and start blogging.

I was looking at Octopress which is built on Jekyl and using Github to host the content. I ran into lots of issues and it was just too much overheard. I ended up looking around with looks of hosting providers for wordpress and settled on wpengine. Couldn't be happier

Octopress 3 not released yet but it is right around the corner. It is much, much easier to use than Octopress 2. If you're still interested in the static route someday you might want to re-evaluate again in a year when it's released and some quickstart guides have been written.

thank you guys for all the feedback so far. I think I'll stay with wordpress for another year and re-evaluate after that.

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