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by brtkdotse 615 days ago
Is WordPress even used for blogging anymore? In my view it’s more akin to Emacs or Jira - a platform to build whatever you want that out of the box just happens to be configured as a blog/text editor/bug tracker.

I’d say this is the golden moment for Ghost to shine.

2 comments

I've been advocating for the removal of the Posts feature, or a configuration flag to disable it because I currently work for a different hosting company now and I have never seen a site using the Posts feature for blogging in my support ticket queue. (Yeah, I use it, but I'm a walking-talking edge case.)

In fact, I've seen a handful of sites that have a "blog" on them, but they don't use the Posts feature for it.

WordPress is a massive monolith despite its extendibility and the thing is that Matt get veto anything (this is why his hello.php plugin is still included as a form of digital manspreading) and many of the unpopular decisions are based on the needs specific to Automattic, like how the wp_posts table was used for pretty much everything until relatively recently.

I would love to see ghost rise higher in all of this, but my experience is that it’s very, very hard to sell most clients on it. They have all heard from someone that Wordpress does everything, it’s the standard, it’ll give them more options down the line, etc.

Ghost is more than enough quite often, but I wonder if a few more key features could convince a large amount of people to convert.

Their editor is great, but making it more extendable would be a huge deal. I’ve dug into it several times now, but I don’t see a clear path to a maintainable plugin API for the editor that would allow you to add more cards at will by just throwing them into a directory for example. It’s possible, but how would you version plugins? Would the editor need to be decoupled from ghost well enough that you can install the version that supports your plugins best? How do you handle broken plugin content? What if someone stops maintaining a plugin; do all the users of it eternally stay on the last version of the editor that supports it?

If that problem was solved I think a lot more people might come over to ghost as things like recipe cards, ad server integrations, form builders, and other popular tools made it into the editor.

Yet, would that actually make ghost better? I think there’s a version of this that would be objectively better, but you’d have to be careful not to allow for all kinds of potential breakage and friction. Right now everything is fully integrated so there are no regressions caused by upgrades. It would be a shame to lose that.

I wish I had more time to work on this. It’s a really fun, properly challenging problem.