Paul Jacobson

Ghost of WordPress’ past

I came across an almost inevitable comparison post between newer blog publishing platform, Ghost, and WordPress the other day. I like Ghost’s emphasis on Markdown and its simplicity. I also know that Nathan Jeffery uses Ghost for his blog and he enjoys using it. You probably guessed that I am a bit WordPress user and have been for almost as long as I have been blogging. I think this line probably captures Ghost’s appeal for many of its users:

In its current form, Ghost satisfies an audience that wants a simple, frictionless, publishing experience.

Comparisons between Ghost and WordPress (or any other publishing platform, for that matter) that are intended to convince you that one is better than another are pretty silly. That said, this comparison post is interesting just to get a sense of what Ghost is if you are familiar with WordPress.

As for me, I like using platforms which let me just write and while Ghost certainly does that, I’m happy with WordPress. I even switched to the visual editor from the plain text editor. You know, just write …

Posted

in

by

Paul

Tags:

, , , , ,

Comments

One response to “Ghost of WordPress’ past”

  1. Nathan Jeffery avatar
    Nathan Jeffery

    Agreed, each has a purpose and fills a market yet drives the other to improve and innovate. It’s like the Windows vs Mac vs Linux debate. I use a Mac workstation but multiple Linux servers and a Windows one too(cough), each one filling a need.

    I’ve tried Svbtle, Medium and Silvrback, each of which offer a simple publishing platform. When comparing Ghost to these three options, it’s the clear winner as your data is portable and you could run it on your own servers if you so desired even though I’d recommend Ghost(Pro) if you do want to give it a spin. The nice part of this is that should the Ghost Foundation decide to close down and stop managing Ghost, you could easily keep you content running on your own server in a portable non-proprietary data format or migrate to a new project born out of Ghost in the future.

    Long term though, Ghost have a great sustainability model and I really like the blend of Open Source and Non Profit but with paid services. Super cool.

    With the other three platforms out the way; considering WordPress vs Ghost; to me Ghost is the Apple of blogs [at the moment], you log in and it works. There are few options in terms of settings, so you could safely ignore them if you wanted, you can just sit down and type(write). Focus on the words.

    To me WordPress is a lot more, I’ve spent a few years working with WordPress and we manage multiple WordPress sites for clients. It has a great eco-system which I’m sure Ghost eventually will have too, and it’s super flexible.

    We run our business website on WordPress for example and I’m happy recommending it to clients for a variety of use cases.

    No matter which one of the platforms you use, I think the main ingredient is ones ability(or discipline) to sit down and convert thought to text, something which I for one am not doing enough of. 🙂

    Reply

What do you think?

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.