Hello.
We are an ONG planning on using Ghost as an articles/blog solution in the short term.
In the long term, we want to allow our visitors/users to publish their own posts. Is there an existing solution that will allow us to do this?
So, to clarify:
Our admins -> Can post, edit, manage posts
Users -> Can add a post (forum like)
Thank you,
You could try integrating Discourse (a forum) which is what we’re using right now to have this discussion, and is designed exactly for that purpose:
Thank you John,
Heavily edited after reading some more
I believe what our team is looking for is a solution that has the nice blog look and feel Ghost can have, but also allows posts from the users.
is that possible? What I can see for discourse is that while it looks very nice, it also has a very Forum like format.
Thank you and sorry for the edit of the comment,
Mar
Discourse integration isn’t bad.
But it would be interesting to be able to give registered users the opportunity to write an article, as it is for staff users.
Something like “sign up as an author / writer”. And the post is displayed exactly as if it were written by a staff.
Of course it’s just an idea, I know the section is still in beta, there are more important things that have priority.
Hi,
yes, that is exactly what I would be able to do. Give registered users the ability of posting themselves.
Mar
Staff users in Ghost are considered trusted because they are allowed to write JS, CSS, use SVGs etc. Anything they need to create a customised rich article design and reading experience is available to them.
If staff user access is opened up to public registrations it would entail a lot of design and UX work both in the admin client and the API to restrict what can be done on security grounds and there would likely still be holes.
You’d be better off using an external system to collect basic content submissions which can be vetted and then transferred into your Ghost site. It doesn’t need to be complex, even plain email would work if it fits your use-cases 
Increasing levels of automation can be applied if you need it using things like Zapier and Ghost’s Admin API.
I think what @Kevin exposed is what would work best. In addition, one idea i had to this myself in the future is to develop like a guest card in HTML/CSS, so when you receive the guest post content, you can actually put a global guest user and add the card at the bottom of the post to include the specific person details.
I am developing a tutorial about this soon in my site so you can check it out when i finish this at GhostPortal
Hello @gregpozo, guest cards in post (without adding new user) would be awesome, for sure, but how would you built this without custom fields ? 
There is potential solution coming from the Write.as team called… sigh… Submit.as. It is made specifically for the use case you describe. It works with Write.as, which can publish to Ghost. It sounds like the cross post part isn’t 100% worked out yet. It is also not free.
If you are looking to build a writing community, a better fit might be Write Freely which is also open source. That is purpose built for a team of editors + community posting/blogging.
Depending on your use case, your main team could be on Ghost and put the community on Writefreely. With some careful attention to theme implementation it could work depending on your end goals.
@gregpozo It is not clear to me how you can do such a thing.
I’m curious, keep us updated.
If I’m understanding @gregpozo’s suggestion correctly it sounds like using the HTML card with some standard markup on each guest post to display the guest-author details.
If you’ve automated some of your guest posting using the API then insertion of that HTML card at the bottom of the post with all relevant details can also be automated.
Sure, im working on it. The idea is to have a HTML code that will serve as the guest user card. That code will have the user details and then you just need to paste it where you want. Nothing crazy i guess.
I’ll launch that tutorial in my site soon:
Yes! I have been thinking about it for a while. For those types of things is that i decided to create GhostPortal. I have a lot of crazy ideas and i love ghost, so why not just blog about it!?
I would like to see these feature too.
Discourse and Submit.as doesn’t resolve this problem. You need to pay extra for submit.as and Write Freely and it’s $30 per month. And it doesn’t integrate with Ghost.
Discourse is forum, not submission tool.
So far there’s no good solution to this. Except something like Google Forms. We need something like https://www.submittable.com/ which is $84 per month. But with paid and free submissions options.
For those of you interested, i published a tutorial with a workaround. So far it works for me, hopefully it will work for you too!
I looked into something similar: Giving staff users (i.e. trusted users and not too many of them) the ability to create new posts by sending an email to a specific email address, I played around with Zapier, but it felt awkward. Therefore I wrote my own little tool:
It’s tested only in my specific setup but works great for me.
Is there a way to use Ghost 3 to support user-submitted posts (site visitors can submit content for moderation > publication with minimal friction)? Or is the best route still an external service or workaround like those already suggested in this thread?
Hi, just wanted to chime in here since I saw our Submit.as tool mentioned earlier by @lesliecamacho. We just launched our Ghost integration, so now you can publish submissions directly to your Ghost blog! Here’s a demo of how it all works.
We’re still in our early days with this product, so we’re looking for feedback especially from the Ghost community, and happy to be flexible on things like submission limits. Please feel free to reach out if you have any questions.