Ghost has been a superb platform for my dev blog, and I'm hoping to migrate my personal blog over to it at some point in the future (it's currently using Gridsome).
I was wondering if ghost can also be extended like if you need a little of extra functionality besides just blogging. Like integrating payment with credit card, creating forms etc. or it's just about pages and posts ?
It has built-in memberships so users can register, and you can have monthly and yearly payments if you wanted to create premium content.
As for forms, I think if you wanted a completely custom form, then you would have to use something like TypeForm or JotForm and embed that into your Ghost blog.
It tries to focus solely on publishing and blogging, but recommends other services you can tie in if you need to which you can find here - https://ghost.org/integrations/
I use Hugo with a custom template I made based off a public one that was out there. No need to worry about security updates as it is all just static html. If I every want to change the look, I can just switch out the template and regenerate the html.
All I have to do to write an new post is:
hugo new post/name-of-post.md
fire up vim on the name-of-post.md file and write my post in markdown.
run hugo to generate the html
cd to the public directory and run rsync to publish the new html post to my site.
I wrote my own static site generator in Python. Source format is GitHub-flavoured Markdown. Both VSCode and Emacs have nice plugins for Markdown. Nothing fancy but it does the job. There are plenty of static site generators out there (a nice one I've used is Hugo), but the learning experience from writing my own has been superb.
It's not strictly a blogging platform but I've got a huge amount of time for https://www.11ty.dev/. It's really nice to work with, and works brilliantly for blogs if you're happy working with code.
https://ghost.org/