Hello, Ghost community! As we cruise through the first month of 2024, let’s get some good vibes going for the year with our question of the week:
What’s your favorite feature in Ghost? Whether you’re a seasoned pro or a recent Ghost enthusiast, we all have that one feature that stands out. What’s yours?
The point here isn’t just to celebrate Ghost (we know it’s awesome ), but to enlighten both new and long-time users about the platform’s hidden gems and powerful tools, and to inspire others through your experiences.
Our community is a treasure trove of knowledge, experience, and creativity, especially when it comes to using Ghost. Questions of the week are an opportunity to share and learn from these resources.
Miss our previous questions? Check them out below!
I’ll add what I think is one of our coolest features that can really save you:
You send out your newsletter with a link to register for an upcoming event, but — oh, no — you have the URL wrong. Normally, you might miss out on registrations, face a barrage of confused messages, and have to send out one of those [CORRECTION] emails.
The updating links in newsletters feature lets you avoid all that with the ability to edit the URL for links in your newsletter after it’s been sent.
Barring some revelatory info in the next (?) changelog piece I’m gonna say post code injection as I like having the ability to fine-tune various aspects within a post. Which kinda dovetails with what might be my second favourite feature, snippets, as the post code injection allows me to fine-tune what are actually often HTML cards that have been initially inserted as snippets.
That all being said, and having just had my Ghost(Pro) instance updated to 5.76.1, I’ll reserve my “vote” for the next upcoming feature. Because as the changelog piece hasn’t been released for TK reminders yet I’m unsure if there’s some sort of extra functionality besides the obvious, such as the ability to add a note to the TK that gets hidden from the previewed post. If there’s something like that, I’d probably vote for TK reminders.
For me, it’s probably the fact that I can schedule my newsletter. It allows me to write it when inspiration strikes, schedule it for the future, and not look back until it goes out. There’s something really nice about being able to work ahead, and to set it and forget it.
Mine is a perfect compliment to @Stromfeldt’s, and I would have given Code Injection an honourable mention if he hadn’t already given it a big shout out
Themes
Working with Ghost(Pro) customers every day, I am privileged to spend time with 100s of Ghost sites each week, and I’m constantly impressed by the flexibility of themes and the way folks make use of them in Ghost.
I get to see dozens of great uses of the core range of official themes which really come to life when folks add their own imagery and logos to them, and that’s before I even mention those who might add some custom typography and maybe a little personal flair via (yup, here it is) code injection. Theme design settings have really lifted what you can do with our official themes, and the launch of Source as our new default theme doubled down on giving options to the site owner.
In the wider theme marketplace, there are so many great options, many of which are laser-focused on certain use cases of Ghost (portfolios, photography sites, documentation, online courses, etc.). As a community, Ghost developers have really powered up what folks can achieve with no or low-code on Ghost—that brings more people into the fold, ready to own their own content business and (this is the important bit) able to focus on content rather than learning how to design a website.
A small one that I think goes unnoticed a lot of the time is adding custom post lists to the Admin sidebar. Useful when you have multiple areas of your site, or if have particular editorial flows where you can use internal tags to indicate a post’s current step within the flow and have instant-access filters to those from the sidebar.
I’ll second the feature someone else already mentioned: editing links after sending out a newsletter. I goofed once already and changed the URL of the blog post, and remembered this feature so that users clicking the email didn’t get a 404 page. That was awesome, instead of republish-and-apologize!
Snippets for sure. I can create any layout I might need even if I am not savvy enough to tweak the HTML in the theme. Snippets have saved me so much time!
I like the video card, but I can’t give it my top pick, because it doesn’t have a full screen toggle feature.
I definitely use snippets all the time and also LOVE the mini email form embed (where they simply enter their email to get on the list). It probably has a more official name.
Another hidden (?) feature? I recently noticed that adding “TK” comes with certain document formatting that is helpful for making notes to ourselves: a “TK” in the margin, along with a green highlight in the body when you hover over the margin TK.
I feel like I did see a reference to this somewhere but I didn’t see anything about it on the forum. If I missed the announcement, sorry!
Hehe, the “reference” you saw to it was probably via my comment up above. I’ve been waiting for its announcement for a couple of weeks now, partially in hopes that there’s also some kind of hidden notes feature to it. We’ll see.
I finally got myself to start using the duplicate post feature for my daily newsletter. I love how easy it is and how I don’t have to manually set up the same post features (tags, author, various sections and callouts) day after day. When every day feels like triage mode, sometimes it’s even hard to find the time to do the things that make our lives easier, but I really love using this! :)
A semi old question but snippets and link previews are two of my top favourites with Ghost. In all the Ghost editor beats anything I ever tried in regards to writing online
), but to enlighten both new and long-time users about the platform’s hidden gems and powerful tools, and to inspire others through your experiences.
