They were giddy

Share & showcase
1

Over 10 years of WordPress posts. 50 WordPress plugins. 200 authors. Three domains.

Today after months of planning and work the Limestone Post from Indiana has gone live on Ghost(Pro).

This week I trained new staff on Ghost– their first in-depth look at the new Ghost admin area compared to WordPress. The reaction: giddy. For comparison, here’s what greeted them when they logged into WordPress:

image
image1920×1152 255 KB

They would be ask “so I don’t need to manually create HTML for this? For that?” I can just paste a YouTube URL and it becomes a video embed!

I showed them some support and the “/” command to quickly insert different things.

“And we don’t need MailChimp? We can create newsletters right here and it’s just like creating a post?”

And donations are built-in, and analytics are built-in…

When I first looked at their WordPress install, I wasn’t sure it would be feasible to move at all, because they had literally 50 WordPress plugins installs. So I made a big spreadsheet and audited them one by one. Turns out the plugins all landed into one of several buckets: Many were replaced by native Ghost features. Some were unnecessary. Some inactive. Some duplicates. Some were part of themes, and some were like plugins to other plugins, and some could be easily replaced by third-party services that provide for example an iframe. A very small number needed special handling during migration, like an ad plugin with special ad code syntax.

Oh, and I benchmarked loading the front page: It’s about 10x faster running on Ghost(Pro) than WordPress on cPanel. Yes, there’s less bloat and a real CDN now, but that wasn’t the only issue I found looking carefully at the old source code. Some WordPress malware had been inserting hidden promotions of casinos and other things into the source code.

So yeah, they were giddy to not be dealing with WordPress updates, plugin updates, security updates, slow page loads, hidden casino ads, and visual clutter and tedious tasks editing HTML.

Thanks to @Cathy_Sarisky who was the lead migration wrangler on the project who dealt with her own share of challenges to make this happen.

16 Likes
2

Isn’t there a plugin to manage migrations as this?:) Just kidding, I can only imaging the project and technical workload. How did you map / manage the transfer of certain Gutenberg Blocks to Ghost? Assuming they were on Gutenberg? Any experiences you can share here?

3

@Cathy_Sarisky is the bees’ knees. She performed similar magic on my WP sites last year. I wrote a post about why I moved to Ghost and some of my early observations.

2 Likes
4

That screenshot should have an NSFW warning (or similar). Those PHP Update Recommended warnings brought back all sorts of horrible memories :wink:

3 Likes
5

There can never be too many posts like this. Thank you.