Ghost 3.0
Hi HN, John from Ghost here. Thanks for the comments about 3.0 — we spent a lot of late nights on this, and it's a pretty big upgrade for Ghost as a platform (which is now 6 years old).<p>I know the audience here is generally more interested in technical details and reasons for why this took longer than 1 weekend to build. So I'll share a few more relevant details absent from the marketing copy:<p>- The new membership system is effectively just an email database with JWT based authentication. Two cool things about this: You can import any CSV of emails and that's now a user database of people who can log in, and 2: not storing passwords at all is pretty great.<p>- New billing features are a deep integration w/ Stripe Billing API, which works with your API keys, not via Stripe Connect, so there's no middleman. Ghost can't add any fees on transactions, and volume doesn't flow through our Stripe account in any way - so it remains completely decentralised without a bottleneck. The significant part of that is: If Ghost the company were to ever go away, your site/billing/everything would keep working as normal. Doesn't depend on us.<p>- All our APIs and Webhooks have been continually improved to the point where Ghost is now the most popular (at least by Github stars, the fruit of life) open source headless CMS out there. Also a new Github Action for CI/CD of Ghost themes makes that whole process a lot less painful<p>"What's the point of this, why not just use [x]"
Because [x] is some combination of: closed source, centralised, written in decade old procedural PHP, or has some sort of UI which no non-developer wants to go anywhere near. We try to sit at the juncture of these things with a decentralised product, easy to run with a managed service, built with tech developers don't hate, and a UI that people who create content really love.<p>Also: Something about Postgres<p>On a serious note, thanks for all the support. Ghost launched on HN and it was that initial boost that got everything started. I'll be hanging out in the comments here throughout the day.