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Ghost 3.0

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Re: Ghost 3.0

#3

Post by johnonolan »

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old).

I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy:

- The new membership system is effectively just an email database with JWT based authentication. Two cool things about this: You can import any CSV of emails and that's now a user database of people who can log in, and 2: not storing passwords at all is pretty great.

- New billing features are a deep integration w/ Stripe Billing API, which works with your API keys, not via Stripe Connect, so there's no middleman. Ghost can't add any fees on transactions, and volume doesn't flow through our Stripe account in any way - so it remains completely decentralised without a bottleneck. The significant part of that is: If Ghost the company were to ever go away, your site/billing/everything would keep working as normal. Doesn't depend on us.

- All our APIs and Webhooks have been continually improved to the point where Ghost is now the most popular (at least by Github stars, the fruit of life) open source headless CMS out there. Also a new Github Action for CI/CD of Ghost themes makes that whole process a lot less painful

"What's the point of this, why not just use [x]" Because [x] is some combination of: closed source, centralised, written in decade old procedural PHP, or has some sort of UI which no non-developer wants to go anywhere near. We try to sit at the juncture of these things with a decentralised product, easy to run with a managed service, built with tech developers don't hate, and a UI that people who create content really love.

Also: Something about Postgres

On a serious note, thanks for all the support. Ghost launched on HN and it was that initial boost that got everything started. I'll be hanging out in the comments here throughout the day.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#4

Post by Malfunction92 »

johnonolan wrote: post #3

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…

For a second, that "raised 5 mil" line really made me doubt everything I've learned from you guys until I actually read through the post. Congratulations!

Re: Ghost 3.0

#5

Post by praveenweb »

In my experience, Ghost has been the no-nonsense blog CMS that has been stable and just worked with very little maintenance.

I like that they are now moving towards static site JAMStack approach, driven by APIs rather than the current SSR model. This lets anybody to customise their themes with the language / framework of choice and generating static builds that can be cached for improved loading times.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#6

Post by praveenweb »

johnonolan wrote: post #3

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…

> Also: Something about Postgres

Is Ghost bringing back support for Postgres? :)

Re: Ghost 3.0

#7

Post by 8458e112e7b2 »

johnonolan wrote: post #3

Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old). I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy: - The new membership sy…

Congrats on the release and hope Ghost is even more successful now with all the added features.

Any idea when 3.0 will be available to self-host?

Re: Ghost 3.0

#8

Post by nickjj »

Serious question.

In the article it writes "all whilst operating as an independent non-profit organisation releasing open source software.".

But this is right before talking about generating $5,000,000 in customer revenue and giving away 0% of the business.

So when you're a non-profit, what happens with that $5,000,000 of business generated revenue? How much of a salary do you give yourself? Can you even give yourself a salary if you label yourself as a non-profit? What makes paying yourself a salary as a non-profit different than a regular business?

Whenever I read sentences like that, it makes me very suspicious. Whenever I see a Ghost blog post talking about the product it always feels like they try to bring maximum attention to being a non-profit in a way that is supposed to be less evil than a profitable business but then you talk about millions of dollars of "business revenue" and I never understood how it works.

Re: Ghost 3.0

#9

Post by therealmarv »

looks nice. Especially like the membership module and will definitely look more deeply into integration with nuxt.js (wow).

One thing I don't like is that the membership api seems deeply integrated with Stripe only. That's okay for a start but in many countries in this world Stripe is not available (for me it's the new PayPal. E.g. I'm based in Cyprus and Stripe will not work here although it's EU) and I would welcome a better flexibility or plugin system for other payment providers:

https://github.com/TryGhost/Members/tree/797bab5d9218d7796f0...

Are there any plans for that? Do you think it is easy to integrate other payment providers in future?

UPDATE: ok, I've seen your website FAQ https://ghost.org/docs/members/faq/#can-i-use-other-payment-... I will not support a one payment gateway blog membersite. Sorry Ghost.

Stripe censorship excludes basically (beside regions) also many topics. Thinking about writing about intimate topics, erotica or health? Good luck in using Stripe with that.

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