For those following along, we recently moved this site from Wordpress to Ghost.
Well… we’re back on Wordpress
Ghost is a modern blogging platform – and I think it does a great job at what it is designed for. It’s fast (!!), clean and… effortless
Effortless until you try and do something outside of just blogging – which, unfortunately is what a site like Square Pixel Photography requires.
The Advantages of Ghost
Ghost is great – it offers heaps of advantages over Wordpress for many people
Speed
Ghost is fast. Really fast.
No speed optimisation required. Host the site and run it behind Cloudflare and you will have a blazingly fast website. No hassle!
Wordpress can also be fast… but it requires much more thought and work to get it to that point.
Ease of Use (depending on your needs)
If you just want to write without distraction and you don’t have the need for any features outside of what Ghost offers out of the box… Ghost is easy. Really easy!
And it certainly has enough built in features to cover many blogging use cases!
The Disadvantages of Ghost
So, what are the things that we struggled with on Ghost?
Media Management
Unfortunately there are zero options to manage media (images, download files, etc) on the Ghost platform. Not even a simple media library.
It is one of the most requested features, but the Ghost team have advised it is not on their radar to implement.
I understand why – they want to keep things simple – and for their vision of Ghost their current system works. However – when you want to upload an image for use in multiple locations, it makes things very difficult.
Link Management
To help keep this blog running, we rely heavily on affiliate links. This requires a certain amount of admin to make best use of the links.
Ghost offers no easy way to do this without using an external provider ($$)
Ghost also lacks any way to easily manage internal links (linking from one article to another). It is possible, but slow and manual, with no searching function – which makes things a little tedious
Limited Layouts
There is no doubt that writing in Ghost is easy. The editor is beautiful and distraction free.
But if you want a layout that is anything more than just blocks of text and images that flow one after the other… you need to dive into html code.
Now, I’m pretty good with writing HTML… but I don’t want to be using it to do things as simple as adding two columns of text.
This could be solved by allowing people to create and save different types of custom ‘cards’… but so far Ghost doesn’t allow anything outside of their default offerings.
It just makes things harder.
Summary
Don’t get me wrong, I really like what the Ghost team have done with the platform – and for many blogging use cases it is a very good platform – just not for this one.