Ghost 4.0 - Really Terrible for Personal Blog

Not saying anything new, but just reinforcing some ideas:

  • I believe Ghost is going in the right direction to help decentralize media (and we greatly need that)
  • I love Ghost 4 and its main features and plan to build a few communities on top of it
  • I do believe the Ghost team is often times too strongly opinionated (some UX at admin level, social profiles restricted to twitter and facebook, email integrations, etc.)
  • I also believe Ghost team should allow for more freedom of choice (the core idea of open source) within Ghost (options/toggles to turn on/off various features, like members/portal)

I would remind everyone that Ghost is an open source project and can be forked and adapted to a different audience (but it requires resources, time and contributors) if those who feel strongly about a certain set of features also want to put in the work to make them reality.

That said, I don’t think Ghost is terrible for a personal blog, but I have a friend whom I’ve migrated on Ghost for his blog and he wants a no subscription publishing platform.

9 Likes

Ghost is on the right way, and I am sad you can’t see that.

Writings happens only when people read. The best way to care about your readership is delivery your writings to them and have a place for them to log in and get something special, for example commenting and talking with you. All of this don’t require payments, you can just have free membership.

And if you don’t want it, just unflag from admin the portal option and remove cta. If you really don’t want that, keep using your old theme without it.

Hi Sigul,

Please don’t be condescending to small-time hobby bloggers like me…

I write just for the fun of it. Dumping my brain. And if someone runs into the same problem, maybe the will find my blogpost. So yeah, there’s reading, but not a lot. But I do write.

I don’t know my readership and that’s by choice. I don’t write to please people, I write about things I like. If someone wants to read it, be my guest. Please don’t assume all people are the same or do things for the same reason.

It’s not about the payment. Having “members” forced upon me (unless you know how to edit themes or something) exposes me to GDPR hassle, having to set up an email infra structure or having a UI that’s confusing, because the ‘Subscribe’ button doesn’t work.

Please tell me where this flag is, that’s all I need! (see my reaction above Ghost 4.0 - Really Terrible for Personal Blog - #29 by sandersghost)

So, please don’t be like that. If you read my reaction, I totally acknowledge professional bloggers. Please acknowledge us as well.

4 Likes

I was also surprised by the v4 dashboard and the space taken by rather useless graphics and photos of hipster businessmen determined to make money by telling their stories (I’m half joking: paying to read is the newspaper model, which does not work in europe for the obvious reason that customers do not want to pay for poor quality articles).

It is also a way of fighting against advertising, and I would be the first to choose this type of business model if it became a habit for readers.

I wouldn’t want ghost to lose its simplicity and elegance, so the possibility of organizing the dashboard would be sufficient.

The subscribe button can be disabled, and some template changes are enough to not use auth. It may be up to the designers to document their themes to allow auth to be deactivated in a simple way.

I am therefore very happy with v4, and think that ghost remains the best CMS, unbeatable for performance (responsive images … professional quality themes like those of fueko which are very well coded etc.)

4 Likes

Ghost is really brilliant for a personal blog.

I mean, really brilliant.

I have worked with WordPress for over a decade. No more. I was completely fed up with it’s ever-growing needless complexity (as were my clients), and themes that look good only if you go back to 2008. I have converted to Ghost fully.

My clients use Ghost for blogging, and most are personal blogs.

A lot of people here are getting hung up about stuff that really just does not matter in the scheme of things. They create for themselves and not for their readers, hitting the walls of subjectivity over and over. A lot of stuff I read on here nobody outside of this forum is ever going to care about. Readers just want content, and Ghost delivers that in a way no other platform can.

Ghost has a clear USP and they clearly aren’t moving from the direction they are headed. I really like their bluntness in this regard. It builds trust and credibility; I feel that I can rely on them to stay the course.

Members and subscribers built into a platform is just amazing. The thought of wrestling and managing this in WordPress now gives me cold sweats. And anybody with even the vaguest inkling of how to edit Ghost files can remove or reword the subscribers or members functionality.

I saw a similar situation when Gutenberg was released for WordPress. The community was divided, with many pained by the impending change - the standard human response. Looking at the original editor now compared to Gutenberg is like looking at a typewriter next to a laptop. So much energy and time can be saved by accepting the changes Ghost are making here and working with what you have, not pushing against it.

5 Likes

This has already been addressed, many times here. We don’t disagree with anything else you’ve said. It was a checkbox before; nothing is gained from no longer giving people the choice in the UI.

This thread is going in circles, I think an admin should probably lock it. Let’s track this on the feature request thread.

1 Like

I have been using ghost for the past 5 years and I have not got any issues at all, I am hosting on the Cloudways platform, business growth is got improvement in the last year.

Ghost is a freeware if you are using it as a Self-hosted. I really love it. But there is only one issue to me with Ghost 4. Loading portal.min.js even portal is turned off. But this is the best, speediest, simple and most flexible blog platform.

Cheers Ghost creator. I would like to kindly request to you all to stop loading poral.min.js while we turned off Portal. I know that, this request will make confusion with you. But as a website owner who worries about the website’s speed, I think this request is a fair request.

1 Like

I think it’s a very fair request. It is, after all, over 300kb in size even when minified and loaded from your own server.

1 Like

In the feature request thread that’s been closed and can’t be voted on anymore? That being said, I understand that ghost is an OSS project but seeing as so many people don’t want this feature having a way to turn it off is all that’s being asked even if it’s a quasi-hacky way I think is a reasonable ask.

Several quasi-hacky ways are provided in the post below, where Ghost Staff is also contributing helpful guidance and replies…

In the feature request thread that’s been closed and can’t be voted on anymore?

That happened after I posted my reply, but I share your frustration. I almost don’t fault the Ghost team locking it. The tone of some replies (even the title of this thread) have been inflammatory and unproductive. There are human beings behind this tool we all otherwise love using. I also apologise to the Ghost team if I’ve contributed to this.

But it should also be telling the Ghost devs something. A significant number of their users want/need the previous toggle functionality from 3.x, and we still haven’t been given a clear answer why it was removed.

For now I’m recommending people in newsgroups/social media etc to hold off on upgrading to 4.x for now until the proverbial dust settles.

It seems to be WIP as there’s a change request in the code about it. We’ll most likely see a toggle soon.

1 Like

@thebear.dev, “most likely”? More like definitely. Ghost stated more than a month ago that “we’ll be adding a feature to disable members completely”.

Not sure why people don’t check out Ghost’s Twitter account more often.

And I’m not sure why I didn’t relay the above Tweet a month ago either. Maybe cause I don’t mind seeing rude, demanding, ungrateful people squirm a bit.

1 Like

That’s wonderful news! Appreciate you sharing.

Beers all around for the Ghost devs when this is released. Or coffee, or whichever their drink of choice :)

Ah, cool. I did not check Twitter, I just reviewed the changelog in the code.

I don’t mind pushing the subscribe model, just needed a way to disable it. I’m messing with my theme now and hard coding the whole subscribe/member sections out.

Most of the previous logic had something like this:

 {{#if @labs.members}} ...

It would be nice if that still worked or something similar was implemented. That aside, I’m honestly really happy with ghost right now. It’s one of the simpler and fastest CMS I’ve used in a long time.

So props for all the great work everyone’s been doing.

So I’m still working through the v4 upgrade, and have also posted a similar question.

So far, the best I have is Code Injection to hide the new Membership pieces. This is what I am using, with the default upgraded Casper theme.

<style type='text/css'>
    /* Hide the Membership aka Subscribe actions etc. */
    .footer-cta,
    .gh-head-actions,
    .site-footer a[href^="https://ghost.org"] { display: none; }
    .gh-head-inner { grid-template-columns: auto auto; }
    .gh-head-brand { max-width: 400px; }
    .gh-head-menu { justify-content: flex-end; }
</style>

P.S. I increased the size of the Home aka Brand link to 400px, as it was wrapping badly for most of my users blogs.

P.P.S This may also take out Facebook and other social links, as it hides the Action menu completely.

Thanks for the information in the tweet.

But I think it isn’t particularly constructive to use ad-hominem attacks either — try to criticise ideas/actions and not people

FAQ - Ghost Forum

Be Agreeable, Even When You Disagree

You may wish to respond to something by disagreeing with it. That’s fine. But remember to criticize ideas, not people. Please avoid:
[…]

  • Ad hominem attacks
1 Like

Hasn’t that always been the ideal for Ghost?