Getting Started With Ghost

I’m rating this five stars because it accomplished everything it set out to do, but books like this really defy rating. This is a procedural book. You’re meant to have this open while you do stuff. There’s not a lot of words – it’s largely screencaps and code listings.

Books like this also become less about the actual thing (Ghost) and more about the assemblage of contributing technologies. There’s far more in this book about Node, Grunt, Stylus, and Handlebars than there is about Ghost.

Ghost perplexes me. I still don’t understand the point, and I’ve had a Ghost blog for the last year. The intro provides some background of the project, which was very helpful in understanding the motivations of the people behind the project, even if I still don’t agree with them.

Ghost purports to want to let people “just publish content,” yet a big motivation of the project seemed to be to use Node and Javascript in something instead of PHP. If I just want to publish content, why would I care?

To this day, I still don’t understand why someone would use Node over WordPress. There is just no practical benefit, and it’s going to be interesting to watch the project grow over time. They’re going to field complaint after complaint about features they don’t have, and the project is going to grow to accommodate them (through plugins or growth in the core), until they essentially rebuild WordPress, just in Node rather than PHP.

And then something else will come along and claim to be “the new Ghost,” and the cycle will start all over again…