[shortformblog]

Thanks to Kye for pointing this out to me.

Honestly, you’re actually not going to find much better for a simple multi-user setup than Ghost. It may have a lot of features built around newsletters and analytics that you’re not using, but the thing is, they’re there because it’s essentially throwing you the package it thinks will benefit most users, rather than forcing you to choose a bunch of plugins. If it feels overkill, that’s only because they wanted to cover the broadest use cases, rather than forcing users to decide on a package of 30 plugins, by a myriad number of developers.

I have used a lot of CMS platforms and I think you will find the complexity actually goes up from Ghost in most cases. (And if simplicity is your goal … you’re not going to find that with Drupal, which is extremely enterprise-oriented these days.)

If you think you’re getting overcharged for it, I’d recommend looking into self-hosting. Ghost is an extremely easy piece of software to run in a Docker instance on a shoebox somewhere. I do it myself for a couple of small sites. It’s really not that bad.

[0xEF]

You've convinced me to give it another shot. Another commenter also pointed out Drupal's complexities, which I should have realized, in retrospect.

I am also looking at October, which sounds like it checks some of my boxes, but we'll see. Thankfully, there is no time-table for this project, so I can try a few things out before we settle.

https://github.com/octobercms/october

[shortformblog]

I gave October a pretty serious look about five or six years ago. I like the fact that you can code in the interface, which can feel more friendly than competing platforms. But I thought the community hadn’t reached a level of scale that I thought was enough that I could trust it.

Also, I know that you have said you’re willing to pay and you’re not necessarily looking for FOSS, but I will point out there was some licensing drama with October a few years ago that led to a full-on fork: https://wintercms.com/blog/post/we-have-forked-october-cms

You may also find Kirby a good fit: https://getkirby.com

[0xEF]

Had no idea about the drama surrounding October. Thank you for the recommendations. Kirby looks nice, as well, at first glance.

Will be trying both Winter and Kirby this weekend. I am really struggling getting Ghost up and running properly (LEMP stack). It seems to install fine, but breaks my nginx config so when I go to access the admin page (https://<my.domain>/ghost/) I get a 404 error.

[shortformblog]

Ghost is Node-based, so no PHP. (Shouldn’t functionally matter much as it’s designed in a way that you don’t need to mess in the code once you have everything set.) Not sure about your install process, but make sure your routes.yaml is properly set:

https://www.mellen.io/ghost-blog-404-error-fix/