Feedback on my first week with Ghost

I am entousiast about Ghost and impressed by the easiness of the setup. It have the impression of a well thought and soundly opinionated platform. The available themes are looking great and the possibility to couple the Ghost backend with a Gatsby/Hugo whatever frontend opens up the possibilities.

That’s said, i felt necessary to contribute to Ghost staff and the community my impressions with a focus on what leaves me dubitative rather than only celebrating (that great platform).

Customizing a blog staff user first email with custom text and branding is impossible from the dashboard. It requires modifying Core.

  1. Modification of Ghost/core is required to change the emails templates. Not being able to customize the first email that a staff member receives sounds like an issue to me. Providing blog admin with a way to manage these “users”: author/contributor/editor their on-boarding experience is essential.
  2. Administrative panel could be customizable to avoid granting unnecessary access to administrative tasks to anybody else than the admin(s). In my ideal world of an admin, I should be able to communicate / provide support to the Staff users, through their admin panel. I mean providing them with (contributors/authors/editors) customized support info like “How to use Ghost” as it stands today but with customized support (writing style recommendations etc ) . Same for About --> it should be a “About the platform rather than about Ghost”. About Ghost should remain.

in consequence of mostly #1 above, I have gone the route of self hosting which is not my preferred solution. I add that in addition to the above, the starter plan limits the number of staff to two, which is way too low. It should be 2 admins rather than two “staffs”. I do not understand the pricing structure.

Roles of the Editor /Authors / Contributors are not fully logical to me

I am a little interrogative on the editorial workflow. Editorial control is systematic over untrusted users “contributors”. That’s great. I disagree that the trusted users: authors, should have the flexibility to publish and article without any editorial control. There should be some editors control for at least a proof checking articles before their publication. It is easy though to allocate mostly/only contributors roles and avoid using Authors.

With respect the editors, it would be perfect if contributors and authors can be scoped to an editor.

It is possible to manage the editorial workflow outside of the Ghost but i doubt this is the most preferred solution (not mine at least). I have the impression that the full editorial workflow (at the least what is necessary to ensure quality in publication) should remain inside Ghost and not pushed outside (i.e. like managed through plugins).

My impression are that of a lack of flexibility in the control of the editorial workflow and the distribution of responsibilities across the various staff members. From the technological perspective, providing the flexibility to us as admins is probably weakening the robustness of the platform (assumption), I would then prefer a more restrictive approach to what an author can do and moving more scoped control to the editors.

The rest is straightforward and my experience very enjoyable. It is amazingly easy to get started and the impression of freedom I enjoy using Ghost is splendid.