I am a newbie trying to decide if I should use Ghost directly or as headless CMS from Gatsby.
I think I understand the pros of using it from Gatsby:
All advantages of static site, “blazing fast” site, low hosting requirements…
Easy setting of PWA
But… what are the drawbacks? What Ghost features will I miss?
Is it possible to set a ghost membership site from Gatsby?? I dont see how it would work…
For scheduled publications I guess it would need a little extra effort…
Perhaps I can start my blog with Gatsby and Ghost as CMS and if at some point I feel I need more of the ghost features I can switch to a full Ghost site. What do you think?
I was wondering about the same thing as you. If i recall correctly, there is some media management that you are going to miss.
Since we already have a table comparing the pros and cons about using Ghost vs Wordpress or other platforms, it would be very useful to have one about this subject.
I am also curious about this exact question…though I am using Nextjs (no Gatsby)
I started my project on Next and really prefer to work in Next. I also like the idea of a CMS and really like what Ghost has done in version 4. So I set up a headless Ghost with Nextjs…and can send my email newsletters from Ghost…and some of the integrations seem perfect.
Membership, though? I am just realizing that … how in the world could this work? I am very curious about other people’s experiences.
I would like a seamless integration where I can create and manage stuff over on Ghost but the user experiences the Nextjs site.
I wasted a lot of time researching static solutions, but in the end, if you want features like memberships, I believe going static adds almost zero value and creates a lot of headaches
First, the G4 changelogs say they have improved performance to make Ghost nearly as performant as static websites…based on tests I ran even before G4, I believe it
Since a blog is by definition text and images, you can achieve speed with using a CDN and caching…I would spend all my efforts on that, rather than generating a purely static website
Jamstack is dead to me, as far as Ghost is concerned!
The strongest reason for using a static front end is if you already have a static front end for a large existing website and you want to integrate Ghost into it.
In most other cases when starting from scratch, the drawbacks often outweigh the benefits. There’s some more info in our JAMstack doc below about some of the differences:
That’s pretty much my situation. At a minimum, I just simply like writing in a cms. I find it easier.
I keep trying to figure out if it’s even practical to use the membership features in this way – is it?
