[shortformblog]

I like the work Ghost has done, but I'm moving away from it in favor of Craft, in part because I feel like my needs are moving faster than that project is.

I think you'd find Craft (https://craftcms.com/) to cover most of your needs and desires from the ecosystem standpoint. It's PHP-based but it's also well-designed and its approach allows for the kind of flexibility that you have to work really hard to get elsewhere.

I was able to set it up with a Markdown editor, shortcodes, Imgix, and a bunch of other must-haves for my use case very quickly thanks to the existing plugin community. And the issues I did run into, I found help from the community almost immediately.

The only downside, really, is that its license isn't open in the way WordPress is, though it's free to use for single-user projects.