Ghost review: This is what they said


No E-commerce?

This is is not an issue. Why? Because there are many tools to help you manage your payment gateway and product(s) and services on top of Ghost. Check out our post Set up an Online eCommerce Business with Ghost to learn about it.

Limited to bloggers?

Most reviews will bring this point. Ghost is limited to publishing blogs. I strongly disagree. While Ghost is branding itself as « the professional publishing platform » you can build « plain standard websites » with or without a blogging section.

« Martine Nadal » and « Barbershop Avenue » are two great examples of plain websites built with Ghost. See them on play-with-ghost.com

While Ghost is branding itself as « the professional publishing platform » you can build « plain standard websites » with or without a blogging section.

At the end of the day, it's all about the way you structure your website.

Memberships & Subscriptions

It's coming with version 3. The Ghost team is working hard to create a membership section built-in to the software.

Quote:

Add full membership support to Ghost, allowing readers to sign up, login, and comment on stories. Having readers become members opens up a lot of exciting future functionality, including:

  • Paid subscriptions (like Stratechery or TheInformation)
  • Personalized reading recommendations based on reading history (like Amazon)
  • Personalized email newsletters based on user history (like Product Hunt)
  • Detailed analytics on a per-user basis (allows advanced tools like Mixpanel/Kissmetrics to be used)
  • Full community integration with Discourse via Single Sign-On
  • User submissions (like Hacker News)

Memberships as a core part of Ghost would primarily make the platform far more powerful in terms of the type of sites that can be built with it, and the types of apps and services which are able to integrate into it. This is an idea I’ve been toying with for a very long time.