I Built a Guest Editor for Ghost

I built and launched an external editor for Ghost that lets visitors submit content without signing up or needing an API token.

The workflow is simple:

Open editor → Write → Add details → Submit → Ghost draft

The submission goes to Ghost for review, so visitors don’t need access to the Ghost Admin panel or any Ghost credentials.

I built it mainly for community-driven publications where you want developers, writers, or creators to submit content without adding another signup step.

It’s live now.

Curious if anyone else is working on something similar for Ghost, or has ideas for features that would make a public submission editor more useful?

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I assume there must be an API token somewhere?

Would be great if you could share the end result.

Yeah, there’s still a token on the backend, it’s just never exposed to the visitor. The external editor handles the submission and sends it to Ghost server-side.

I’ve got the end result live here: Editor

i will send you the screenshot once yousubmit

Got it, that’s what I thought. Just sounded different, so thank you for clarifying!

What I am noticing: that just looks like a normal text editor, but it doesn’t support all editor cards that Ghost has built in. That might be something publishers might want to see.

Though, I am not sure if the purpose of your post is to make this available to others, so feel free to ignore

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Currently, it’s in beta. Yeah, the main purpose is to give visitors quick access to submit their articles without needing access to the ghost main editor

I support this proposal. It would be great if it also allowed suggesting edits (I tried several times without success linking Ghost with repositories on Github).

And optimal with the Ghost composer, which is really great.

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Thanks, I really appreciate that. Suggested edits could definitely be useful, especially for community submissions.

The external editor is currently built with TinyMCE, so it’s not quite the Ghost Composer itself, but I’m trying to keep the writing experience simple and familiar.

GitHub integration is interesting tooI’d be happy to explore that further.

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You may consider directly using Koenig (Ghost Editor) instead of TinyMCE.

NPM: https://www.npmjs.com/package/@tryghost/koenig-lexical
Source: Ghost/koenig/koenig-lexical at main · TryGhost/Ghost · GitHub

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That’s a good suggestion, thank you. I’ll need to look into how Koenig could be integrated with my Python/Flask setup. I went with TinyMCE initially because it was easier for me to get a working version up and running, but I’d definitely like to explore Koenig.

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I am ready to get an editor like this integrated into my theme when it is production ready – happy to beta test as well.

One security thought: I want to restrict access to the editor to members (any tier) who are logged in and the member email must be visible somewhere so that I can follow up before publishing. I will create a staff member named “Community Post” for all of these submissions.

I don’t need the editor to support all of Ghost’s built-in cards; staff members have access to training materials I created that show how the cards (and custom tools) are to be used. Having people embed arbitrary HTML, markdown, URLs (bookmarks) – those are things I want a staff member to do, not anonymous visitors or members.

Is this possible to build inside Ghost so that we can invite collaborators to write and submit drafts, and then lock sections that are well written leaving out only sections that need re-writing. I use Google Docs for this now but that takes too much time.

I also often think about this post that someone made a while back but have not seen any updates:

Just like the post says I do not want potential contributors to see all my snippets, code injection, and other details.

All we want is a simple editor and submission process!

Would be nice to know y’all.

the editor looks likes this its simple, currently its open to all visitors so anyone can submit, will be opensourcing this to further enhance the fucntionality,

attached is a sample photo some who tried and submit a draft

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Your on point, and we are on the same page im currently growing my site and i want to remove the barrier of haviing to register forst before submiting on my blogs community post,

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I agree completely with this sentiment.

One thing that would be VERY helpful would be to load the editor with some instructions that could be customized by the site’s publisher.

For example, every post on my site has a featured/hero image of a specific size, which means a caption for source citation. I’d also like to instruct the submitter to write the except and include a bio after a closing /div.

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Thankyou, btw if youve alrdy tried it, it has