How to implement follow author/contributor feature?

Developer help
1

Hi,
I want users to be able to follow other users, categories or tags.

I’m surprised that this feature is not really available
Any plugins for that?

Thx

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2

When you say “follow”, do you mean subscribe to emails when new content is posted by a new author, category or tag?

Ghost does support multiple newsletters which could be set up to align to those.

Also, RSS feeds can be set up for all these cases, although that’s not as popular a way to follow other folks as it used to be.

3

Hey thanks for the reply.
No, I mean follow the author’s content. So let’s say you have author x. Then author why would be able to follow other x and get a notification every time when author x posts something new.

The same would go for tags.

This feature would work the same as you would follow someone on Twitter or Facebook.

Not sure if this answers your question

4

How would you like the notifications to happen?

  • Email
  • Mobile push notifications
  • Only on-site. Must visit site to find them.
5

I guess email and “on website” would be the most important but mobile push should also sound awesome.

6

So just to offer a bit more context on what I’m looking for is a multi user blogging system where other users can register and start their own blogs and then there is a follow system where every author or registered user can follow other people or other blogs/tags or categories. If you’re familiar with hos blogs in Invisioncommunity software works something like that.

7

I don’t think Ghost has what you’re looking for here. Two major blockers:

  1. No way for a staff user to register themselves, (Maybe you intended to approve them anyway, so not a big deal.)

  2. Ghost security assumes that even the lowest level staff are trusted to not put malicious JavaScript on the site. If you can’t trust your authors, this is a blocker, because they can embed JavaScript into a post and possibly cause the admin/owner’s browser to take higher privilege actions. See this for more - Ghost Security & Privacy . Separation of back end and front end domains is a must, but given that the underlying philosophy is that authors are trusted, I’m not sure I’d assume it’s enough.

(If you’re using a paid Ghost hosting service, you’d also want to check how many staff users your plan included.)

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8

I agree with @Cathy_Sarisky. Also, there’s also no mobile app for push notifications.

This sounds more like Medium, or some open source alternative to it.

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9

Thank you guys appreciate your input.

10

FWIW – I just signed up for Outpost, which gives you a paid account at Contextly. Contextly has both “follow author” and “follow topic” capabilities. I’m still learning my way around, and getting things set up, but it looks promising.

I’ll do a full review of both Outpost and Contextly when I have everything up and running.

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11

Yeah I was wondering what are some suggestions you guys might have. I’m checking Outpost but is this also open source or do you have to subscribe to a monthly plan?

12

Outpost does not appear to be open source. But no matter how you slice it, sending email costs money.

In theory, you can send mass amounts of email from your own server, but be prepared to do significant to work to keep your emails from being marked as spam, including learning about DNS, SPF, DKIM, DMARC and SMTP.

On the other hand, it’s very cheap to send email through a company that specializes it. If you are sending out tens of thousands emails per month, it seems you ought to be able to monentize that enough through donations or ads or something to pay the small fees for it.

Twenty years ago, I would have said, sure, set up your own email server. I ran web & email hosting company then and it worked well enough for us. But, today: no. Let someone else help with that for a modest fee.

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13

Did you get anywhere with this?

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