Ghost is live

Following months of anticipation the first public release of the Ghost blogging platform is finally live.

Released three weeks ago to the 6000 smart Kickstarters who backed the project, Ghost 0.3.2 is now available to everyone.

For anyone not following the saga, Ghost was first dreamt up a year ago by John O’Nolan, a WordPress specialist based in Austria. He then published a post, or perhaps a manifesto, as to what Ghost could and should be.

The aim of the project was to create a blogging platform that’s just for blogging. Inspired by the bloating of WordPress, Ghost was designed to cut out all the extras and get us back to the essence of blogging: writing great content.

The longer I work with WordPress…the more problems I have with it…What started out as a humble blogging platform targeted at enabling digital publishing for the masses, has evolved into a fully-fledged website CMS. — John O’Nolan

Ghost is a focussed response, geared entirely towards great content. It’s just about blogging.

Ghost is innovative in several key areas: firstly, it’s fully responsive, which means every part of it will work on your phone, desktop, tablet, and soon your watch (if tech rumors are to be believed). Secondly, the navigation of content is structured around your content, not around arbitrary dates. Thirdly, the beautifully designed dashboard presents information about your content, not a bewildering array of stats about every plugin you have installed. Finally, Ghost allows you to write content in markdown, by far the fastest way to produce content for the web.

Essentially, Ghost is also open source and fully configurable. Theming is possible, and plugins can be added, ensuring that you are able to make it your own.

Head over to Ghost​.org right now to sign up. Initially, you’ll have to download the source code and host it yourself. However in the coming weeks you’ll be able to host with Ghost — even using your own domain name — and that’s the preferred option because it helps the platform to grow.

If you can’t wait to get started then you’ll still need to register in order to download Ghost’s source code. It’s built with JavaScript using Node.js, so you’ll need a server that will allow you to install it (which probably mean VPS), full instructions are provided here. Happily there are also several auto-install options from Bitnami, Digital Ocean, Rackspace, and more are bound to follow.

Ghost looks like being the next big thing in blogging, whether you’re interested in theming it, extending it, or just using it, now’s the time to get onboard.

Are you planning to use Ghost? Is WordPress still viable as a blogging platform? Let us know in the comments.