Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by afroisalreadyin 1925 days ago
What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing. I'm a developer, so I could use a static site generator, but I would like to deploy a blog for my mother, and I just couldn't find anything that fits the criteria. My personal blog at okigiveup.net is running on a nearly 8-year-old version of Ghost, which I can't update, because (1) they dropped Postgresql support and (2) their new business model is not friendly to self-hosted. It's rather frustrating that there isn't an alternative for which I can say "it's the default OSS solution, so I'll just go with it".
2 comments
krapp 1925 days ago
>What really amazes me is that there isn't a similar blogging platform that is open source, easy to deploy and at least a little visually pleasing.

That's literally Wordpress. Installed by default on almost every shared host anywhere. There's even a free tier on wordpress.com.

I've tried static site generators - Lektor was the latest - but every one of them fell short of what I wanted in some way or another. But Wordpress always works.

link
johnonolan 1925 days ago
Founder of Ghost here - not sure how our business model (which has not changed) is unfriendly to self-hosting? Extensive docs and tools here: https://ghost.org/docs/install/

But let me know if there's anything I can help with

link
afroisalreadyin 1925 days ago
There is the mentioned dropping of Postgres support. Postgres is much more popular than MySQL in open source circles, which makes me wonder why go with the latter. Sqlite is still supported, which makes this even more strange. Also, Ghost used to be a single-site publication platform: You would set up a blog with an admin user, and that would be it. Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do it once you have installed Ghost. The default installer does not ask you a question to turn this off; I couldn't find it in the configuration options, either. The last time I was updating to current version of Ghost, between trying to figure out MySQL and finding out where to customize the site & user options, I gave up.

Thanks for putting the hard work into Ghost, but in the last couple of years, it went from "easy to use self-hosted blogging software" to "publishing platform with highly specific requirements", which is quite a change.

link
johnonolan 1925 days ago
We dropped Postgres (7 years ago) because pretty much nobody was using it, and it was causing lots of bugs and issues in our upstream ORM layer, which has great and working support for MySQL and SQLite. Ghost is open source, and we put out multiple calls for help with Postgres issues - but nobody contributed. So that's how open source goes.

> Now it's a platform for creating multiple sites, and anyone can do it once you have installed Ghost. The default installer does not ask you a question to turn this off; I couldn't find it in the configuration options, either.

There is no way to create multiple sites with Ghost, and never has been, which is why there is no option to turn it off.

Overall, I think if you try using the product I think you might get a more realistic idea of what it does and doesn't do. But I'm not here to sell you anything, so I'll leave it at that :)

link