[johnonolan]

John from Ghost here - Firstly, big congrats to WP team for launching 5.0!

We have lots of ideas around extensibility for Ghost, they just increasingly don't look very much like plugins. We've always been hesitant to ship something which developers would rely on and end up creating yet-another-janky-bloated-CMS, so we've admittedly held back on that front.

The thing about a lot of plugins is, the most popular ones feel like they really shouldn't be plugins. Many plugins are popular simply because they're things which should be in core, while others should simply be tutorials. You shouldn't need a plugin for good SEO, and you shouldn't need a plugin to insert a Mailchimp embed.

To that end we've got a large directory of integrations which show how to make 3rd party services work with Ghost: https://docs.ghost.org/integrations

As for the more advanced platform-specific functionality: I think the long term view of how all platforms will need to work looks a lot more like external APIs and microservices than locally installed hooks and filters.