The new Ghost editor (beta) - Ghost Changelog

News
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We just released the beta version of the latest iteration of the Ghost editor. Over the past few months, our team has been working hard on rebuilding our editor from the ground up using new technology that will help pave the way for the future.

The good news: It’s the same editor you know and love with all of the same functionality and dynamic cards.

The even better news: The new editor has allowed us to introduce additional brand-new features that you can start using today.

Image editing

Ever dropped an image into your content and wished you could quickly make a few tweaks to make it pop, or crop it slightly? Well now you can, with the new image editing features inside Ghost, thanks to our friends at Pintura.

When adding any image or feature image to a post, click the image edit button to get access to the ability to:

  • Rotate, flip, and crop
  • Apply filters and effects
  • Finetune the exposure, brightness, contrast, clarity, and more
  • Redact sensitive information with a blur tool
  • Add annotations like arrows, lines, or text
  • Add a frame to the image
  • Add stickers by uploading any image
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Pintura image editing is automatically included and enabled on all Ghost(Pro) plans by default! Self-hosted users can purchase their own license to use Pintura inside Ghost.

Post history

The new editor now provides a helpful post history of each time your post was edited, saved, and updated.

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You can find post history in the settings menu from any post in the editor, and click on each revision to return to that version of the post. If you need to revert to a previous version for any reason, all you need to do is click Restore 🪄

Bookmarker extension

For many publishers, curating inspiration and reference points from around the web is a fundamental part of the creative process. To help speed this process up, we built a brand new Chrome extension called the Ghost Bookmarker.

With the Ghost Bookmarker installed, you can send links from anywhere on the web into a draft in Ghost as a bookmark card, along with optional notes. Once the post is published, bookmarked links will be added to a new draft.

Once you add a link to Ghost, you can continue reading and browsing, and find your saved bookmarks later in a draft post. It's great for creating roundup newsletters and aggregating stories that you've been reading.

To get started, follow the steps below to turn on the beta of the new Ghost editor, and install the Chrome extension here:

Get the Ghost Bookmarker

How to enable the new editor (beta)

To access the beta version of the new Ghost editor, along with all of the latest features it offers, log in to your site’s admin and turn the beta on from the Labs page in Ghost Admin

Ghost(Pro) users can log in and opt into the beta right away. If you're a developer, self-hosting Ghost, you'll need to update to the latest version first.

We want your feedback

We’d love to hear how you’re finding the new Ghost editor. All you need to do is click the Feedback link in the bottom left corner of the editor and let us know what you think 💬

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As a paying customer of Ghost (Pro), I am highly disappointed that you poisoned the product with proprietary software. I love Ghost, in large part, because I love software freedom. Please switch to a Free solution, or remove this antifeature from the beta.

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Hey there. I’m very much looking forward to what this new editor will enable in the future, and the post history is awesome. However. As a self-hoster, this is quite the middle finger. Not only is proprietary stuff being injected into the stack, the licensing is very expensive and not feasible for most independent publications. I’m quite sure that is not in line with ghost’s mission? Is there really no other way to add this feature?

Also, I hope to be wrong, but this kinda seems like pushing people to ghost pro. Especially if more of this gets added, you will be paying quite a fee to be able to get the full version for self-hosting, which also doesn’t seem to add up with your mission.

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Yes Absolutely right.

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I’m a Ghost (Pro) customer. This feature doesn’t seem to work yet for me, so I can’t test it. Personally I don’t need image editing on my browser, as I like to ensure my images are right before I upload. And I do prefer a lighter editor without extraneous buttons, so maybe we could get the option to turn it off. :slight_smile:

However I can understand the use case for this, especially for the less technically minded users of bigger sites, or publications on tight deadlines.

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Very disappointed with Ghost. First they “force” us to pay for Mailgun for the Newsletter (very criticized) and now $149/year for the image editor. Not very open source. Count me out. For those who have a company, yes, for those who have their Blog as a hobby, you tell me.

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I’m keen to understand this as I’m not that technical. How are they forcing you? If you are self hosting and don’t want the image editor and choose not to install it, will it break the whole editor / platform?

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Image editor, nice! Can you make a deal with Pintura for self-hosted Ghost as well? How about… USD 30 / year for a personal non-commercial Ghost.

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The post revision history is a lifesaver. I hope it doesn’t degrade the performance.

And this Pintura photo editor, can it also be used to edit the already uploaded images in existing articles?

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The Ghost project is open to a pull request that would allow alternate mail providers to be use, but none has been submitted. Building only the features they need and not building other features for free is very open source. Contributing the feature you want instead of complaining about it would be very open source.

Ghost removed nothing from the open source version in this regard. You are free to continue edit images as you did before. I use Gimp, which is free and open source.

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I looked to see what more I could out about this editor. From reading the source code, it appears Ghost has switched to the Lexical editor framework made by Facebook… but Lexical appears to a framework to build editors on top of, so this appears to be a more technical change. As the post above says, this switch will enable some new features to be built on top it, but it doesn’t provide any clear hints on what those might be.

Here’s the Lexical site if you are interested. https://lexical.dev/ There’s a playground / demo there, but since the Playground is only showing one possible editor that could be built with the framework, it doesn’t say much about the direction of the Ghost editor.

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Looks like Lexical is an editor platform itself that can extend ghost editor for integration of more and more APIs from others, even OpenAI in the future.

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I hope the migration to the new editor will go smoothly. Right now, I cannot edit my old HTML cards when I turn on the beta.

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This is a known issue we’re tracking. Sorry about that, it was an unexpected side-effect of using a newer version of the code-editor library in the beta editor that then overwrites the older version that the admin area uses in general. A refresh when you’re editing the old post will get the HTML cards working again.

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Patiently waiting for the docker container to be updated :D any ideas when that might be?

also perplexed as others are regarding the photo editor, nice feature but feels like it should be more of an add-on or separated in some way, not in core functionality that is licensed and toggled on and off.

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Were these features in high demand? Am I missing something?

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Exactly. I think people wants a Media Library, Internal Linking features. But for me it’s not a big problem as long as I don’t have to use it / it’s not automatically active. And post history might be something that I would be concerned of, as it increases the storage needed and probably degrades performance. My self-hosted Ghost already goes 100% ram usage with around 40-50 users online… Hopefully it’s something easy to disable since I don’t plan to use it.

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Amateur here, when you say facebooks frame work the only editor I know of is the one you have access to when posting in FB groups which is very limited, How does facebook use this framework?

We need a built in pop up feature like Eliminator pro of which theirs is amazing, super easy to customize and create your triggers. I don’t know any other way to do pop ups on ghost pro and no one talks about it on here, am I missing something?

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I don’t know. Facebook made the project open source on their GitHub page:

Ghost wouldn’t necessarily use the framework to implement the same features or editor design as Facebook so I’m not sure that matters much.

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Having not used Elementor Pro much (and not at all recently), I’m not sure what you’re referring to. It’s certainly possible to create pop-ups in Ghost, but no, it’s not built into the editor - you’d need some HTML on the page (maybe a snippet?).