Headless Ghost and customizing Admin panel

Developer help
1

Hey All,

I’m considering using Ghost for the first time as the engine that feeds the blogging portion of a customer’s website. They’re looking to eventually run a newsletter, and so I was looking at Ghost as that solution. Further, the simple posting UI and flow is really appealing as the customer has formally had issues with the overwhelm of Wordpress.

One concern I have though, after booting a local instance, is the additional settings and customization that are less relevant for a headless option. For example, is there a way to configure the /ghost admin UI to suppress the Dashboard initial wizard as theme customizations are less relevant and possibly confusing? Same thing with the settings pane and meta data, social cards, site theme, branding, nav, etc. Same thing with the post preview.

Basically, is there a way to modify, extend, or configure the admin UI to remove functionality less relevant to a headless site? Again, I really love the Ghost editor, membership/subscription otions, and mail integrations. So, if you’re wanting to recommend alternatives please keep that in mind as well.

2

I think you’d need to load a custom version of the ember app that does the admin panel. That’ll likely rule out managed hosting.

You’re going to need to think carefully about how to do member management, newsletter unsubscribe clicks, view in browser clicks, etc while headless. Not impossible, but going to be a bit tricky. Without knowing enough about your use-case to really comment, I’d think hard about whether you really really need to be headless, or whether a custom theme and some proxying might be all you need.

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