Tips/Advice on Using Self-Hosted Ghost.org?

Has anyone here made a website using the Ghost.org blog platform? If so, did you make your own theme?

I have this website/blog project in mind and decided to use it as a way to practice and learn more about coding. I decided on Ghost after seeing some great looking sites made with it, following its progress off and on, and hearing stories of why some prefer it over Wordpress and Drupal. I’ve had Wordpress sites before (though only the free version, not self-hosted) and was leaning towards using self-hosted Wordpress, but I wanted to try something new. Also, I really like how clean the Ghost sites look, the ones that I’ve seen anyway.

I was able to find some good stuff on here about Ghost, including this awesome Heroku button that gets you all set up with a ghost site!

I created a Ghost site on Heroku using @liberaltech 's Heroku button, but I haven’t done much to it yet, as the first thing I wanted to do is create my own theme. I’m reading Ghost’s documentation on creating themes, and I’m starting to feel like I’m in over my head. I know—duh, of course, guy :sweat_smile:. I mean, I thought I would be in over my head somewhat. That was kind of the point. I just wanted to throw myself in and go for it. But I’m feeling jammed up, and kind of silly, earlier on than I thought I would. I think that one thing that may help me, though, is testing and editing Ghost with a Glitch project. I found a basic Ghost site made by the Glitch team:

I thought I would post here to see how many people use/have used Ghost, what they think about it, and hopefully share any general tips/advice on using and customizing Ghost. Any Ghost enthusiasts out there? :ghost: :computer:

I think to make sure that you have 2GB of RAM on the server for your website - it’s nice software but very resource intensive compared to WordPress.

1 Like

Oh, I didn’t know that Ghost was more resource-intensive than Wordpress. Thank you!

1 Like

I’m also considering using Jekyll: Static Websites & Blogs + Contentful CMS . I think it might be more my speed. I can create a blog without much advanced coding knowledge (I think) and I’ll also be able to customize its theme, all for free. We’ll see :sweat_smile: .

I’m not sure what you meant by “resource intensive” but the Ghost blogging framework is without a doubt faster than Wordpress by large margins.

Edit: side note

Using ghost will inevitably open up a whole world of programming which will also lead you to blazing fast frameworks like ReactJS (Gatsby) if your mind desires.

There is a Jekyll admin addon if you are interested https://jekyll.github.io/jekyll-admin/

I was more referring to RAM utilization at scale. I’m sure since October lots of changes have been made to improve resource utilization and performance :slight_smile:

Yeah I was reading some of the comments and was surprised by the comment that Ghost was more resource intensive than WordPress. My experience has been that it’s faster and way less clunky than WP because it isn’t trying to do EVERYTHING.

One of our devs played around with it last week and built a Ghost demo where he used Ghost as a headless CMS (deployed on Netlify), and used the subscriber feature to make a weekly newsletter content update. May be worth checking out if you’re interested. The demo itself is pretty plain, but it was a quick setup and more for the subscriber feature. You can find it on the Snipcart blog (it’s the first post), if interested.