Hello, I’ve seen somewhere that Ghost is already working on version 5 and the end-of-life support for V4 is Jan 2023.
This sparked my curiosity and I’ve been thinking about cool stuff Ghost could introduce.
So, what stuff would you like to see introduced?
On my wishlist:
Ditto on welcome emails.
Ditto on 2FA.
Ways to add anchor elements ( <a> ) that would make it trivial to embed links to destinations within a page. IDEALLY, this would also extend to existing cards; I want to add an anchor reference to, for example, a bookmark, product card, gallery, or snippet. I also want this added to the formatting bar that appears when text is highlighed - in addition to bold, italic, quote, and link, “add anchor” to a headers or quote would be very helpful.
Add CSS parameters to the /div shortcut. I have mine defined in the theme CSS but there are times when I want to override it on an individual basis.
Bulk actions on stories and members (and other database elements). Much as I am not a fan of Wordpress, this is one feature I miss.
A built-in way to embed structured tables with controls for things like reviews with access to member database information without custom API programming,
@TheChocolateLife btw look at Memberkit to help with welcome emails on Ghost. Worthy for fixing this problem for now instead of waiting https://www.newsletterkit.co/ (Memberkit rebranded to Newsletterkit) ~~https://www.memberkitapp.com/~~
I remember another one: an easier way to add nofollow and sponsored links. Right now I do this by writing HTML for every link.
I have been in touch about MemberKit – thanks for the reminder.
I also second making it easier to add nofollow and sponsored links.
As I expressed in another post, I don’t need an image gallery – for my needs Snippets handle the very small number of reusable items I have.
without advertising and banners in the Ghost Admin—the experience is awful and doesn’t even look good visually;
the convenience of being able to make more changes to the site’s theme and make it more customizable without requiring knowledge of .HTML and .CSS;
an option that makes CDN implementation much easier;
a comment system would be ideal for communicating with subscribers who want to respond to an article they’ve read—and a verification system that shows you who is a subscriber and who isn’t, via a badge next to their name;
more themes;
From most imporatnt to least:
Public preview for emails (currently only exists for posts on site) most important one
Native comments
Welcome email
Alternative to mailgun
More analytics for sent emails
Native pop-up modals to remind readers to subscribe
You guys pointed out some guys points :)
@SoftwareHints what could plugins do for Ghost that Integrations don’t do at the moment? What would be the benefit?
Yes, @alexgoldman68! More analytics to emails. Especially click tracking. Not a fan of pop-ups tho haha
@agam what do you mean exactly with “optimize images on upload”?
@alexander.m I agree with more convenience needed for theme customization. I just made a huge comment here about it: How can we incentivize the creation of more Ghost themes? - #14 by Tiago
Hello Tiago,
A very useful CMS functionality would be a way to add fields to existing content types (pages, articles, authors, members) in order to create more personalized content. Perhaps with a tag system like in MovableType (knew by older of us) so we can display fields everywhere in the templates.
A more advanced (perhaps later) might be the ability to rename the content types for creating new ones (eg podcasts, books, movies, bibliography,etc). In this way, Ghost would become a very powerful CMS and publishing system ; providing infinite possibilities for content creators.
Other ideas :
From a Headless CMS standpoint, I really hope that the Memberships API will really be rolled out by V5, where via a “Headless CMS” build, we can:
Basically, that is my personal hope for Headless CMS builds, which have been in discussion since V3 on forums, just hope to see it finalized in V5. ;)
Bookmark cards: I’d love to see a 
icon in the bookmark card tooltip that allowed you to visit the site. Also a way to edit the preview text and image.
Integration with Pocket or other bookmarking tools. A way to bring up my Pocket list and embed one of my Pocket saves as a bookmark card. This would complete my curation flow: find interesting site → save to Pocket → (later) write newsletter → open up Pocket → pick bookmark to embed.
I wish search indexed the text of all posts, too. That way I could search to see if I had already posted about something.
Quick list:
User-selected tags, so they can choose the perks they want (a BIG deal for me)
Bulk actions on posts, pages, members
More columns in admin screens, preferably customizable
Ability to reuse images that have already been uploaded
(perhaps) Tables (although lots of variables here)
Better member status updates - I currently use Zapier with Stripe to get these
More email analytics
And one more – Some way to add contributors without having them on staff.
We use content from a number of external sources. On Wordpress, I used the Molongui plugin that let me have unlimited authors who did not have to be members of the site. I was able to do a complete author card for each one, with bio, image, links, and so on. Now, on Ghost, I have a fake staff member called “Guest Author” and ALL those posts fall under that author, which is not best practice for using outside content.
Reuse uploaded images would be so good! I’ve used the same image in more than one post, which would be helpful.
I imagine it would look like the WP gallery
Native Comments
Media Manager
Welcome Emails
Why they have chosen to not have comments as native feature is something that has bothered me the most. As creators we want to be able to interact with supporters. Using third party integrations to be able to achieve this is just a no no.
I’m ambivalent about integral comments, but what I would like to see is an open means to authenticate users with a third party product.
Plugins would add better experience and customization.
For example adsense:
we maintain several websites which has adsense - in order to add multiple ads we need to change the theme. Plugin will make it easier to customize such behaviour.
Plugins can add:
instead of customizing the theme
The idea of the plugins is to separate custom code and features from the theme itself.
I can share more details if needed.
Cheers!
Yes, and a more sophisticated way to handle bylines. The way it is right now gets awfully cumbersome when you have a long list of writers.
Are you suggesting this because there’ a restriction on the number of staff users with Ghost Pro? I don’t have such a restriction, so each guest post is assigned it’s own contributor account and bio etc.