Hi! We just launched our first ghost site with a custom theme (originally based on lyra) and I just wanted to give some feedback of our experience. Perhaps it may be useful to the ghost developers.
This site has been going since 2001, originally as a hand made html site, then a wordpress site and now a ghost site. So as you can imagine there was a lot of legacy content! Because of this we decided to upgrade the theme in series. v1 which is live today contains just the show which has been going since 2012. In future updates we’ll bringing back older features, articles, etc. That is all to say this is all an ongoing process and we still have a lot of work to do on the theme!
I think ghost is an excellent platform and is leagues ahead of basically any platform out there at the moment. The particular highlights to me are the writing experience and newsletter feature. There’s basically nothing around that is this convenient and straight forward.
Here are some issues I’ve had! Some of these can probably be ignored, have been mentioned else where, or maybe are in the process of being done. But I’m just mentioning them anyway!
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Staff profiles 404 if they’re not listed as Authors on a published post
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Can’t enable dark theme with contributor accounts (I think???)
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Can’t add rich text to bio, tag description, etc. I really think there should be an option to do this. otherwise you have to bake it into the template which is annoying.
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Custom tags: I know this has been discussed a lot!!! I realise you don’t wanna open the flood gates, but even one custom field per area would be extremely useful! For example even so you don’t have to use the facebook description to create an rss feed for itunes. this is very annoying (you can’t even put the episode length in with this solution). So many of our staff members don’t use facebook but they do use x, y, z, social network. It feels very 2014 to have the only options be facebook, twitter, website.
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Unique Membership Feeds: It would be extremely useful to be able to generate unique rss feeds per member (like patreon does). You would probably have to upgrade audio to being a field for this (so you can generate a unique token to the mp3). But to me that’s a good thing!! (We also wouldn’t need a custom field then for generating the itunes rss!)
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Members: As has been said a few times it would be nicer to have multiple tiers of membership. We would probably completely replace our patreon with ghost if we could do this. I know there are round about ways of doing with stripe but it would be better to have it built in since that’s the entire advance of ghost.
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Portal: What a great idea!!! Really love this. I wish however there was an option to use it for people who want just want to give their email to sign up for a newsletter without presenting the whole create a free account thing (even if that is what’s really happening in the backend).
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Routes for uploading media: I’m sure this is contentious because I can see the various way it could break but it would be nice to be able to create routes for where files upload. For example we wanted to be able to upload all the show assets into a show folder on our S3 instance.
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Delete media: When you delete an image it should actually delete it from your storage. I’m sure this has been talked about a bunch. The asset has lost it’s link and it can’t be relinked through the cms anymore. Again I realise how this could be dangerous but even giving it as an option in the settings (even through config.production.json) would be extremely appreciated.
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- Possible a bug or how I’ve setup my routes. But if a contributor slug is a number like say 108 then it will load the show page and not the contributor page. So for example 108 would instead to go 108. For now I have made sure this doesn’t happen by making sure every contributor slug is a name instead of a number. But if anyone can help me fix this I would be extremely appreciative.
routes:
/show/rss/:
template: rss/show
content_type: text/xml
collections:
/:
permalink: /{primary_tag}/{slug}/
template: index
taxonomies:
tag: /{slug}/
author: /contributor/{slug}/