Show IH: Ghost 2.0 Launch
Hey Indie Hackers! We’re shipping Ghost 2.0 today, which I’m stoked to share with you.
The blog post has all the details about what we're releasing, but I thought the IH community might be more interested in some behind the scenes details.
Ghost is about 5 years old now, and this is our 3rd major iteration (the first was v0). The company is structured as an Indie Non-profit organisation, and everything we do is generally released as open source.
Previous appearances on IH:
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Podcast: https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/007-john-onolan-of-ghost
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Reflecting on 5 years / $1M ARR: https://www.indiehackers.com/forum/5-years-3m-no-investors-everything-we-learned-building-the-1-cms-on-github-ama-0ac99b72d7
Anyway, what's wild about 2.0 is that this release was largely crafted by just 3 people. One back end dev, one front end, and one designer, who really pulled out all the stops in the last year to get us from 1.0 => 2.0.
There are lots of interesting stories to tell from the journey — and I know there are a lot of indie makers here who are in the process of (or planning) launch their own thing — so I'd love to answer any questions you guys/girls might have. Always happy to share!
looks like a lot of great improvements john, congrats ^_^ what do you hope to get out of it all? more people using ghost? less customer support? more upgrades to ghost pro?
This release is mostly about broadening what people are able to do with the product and opening up more use-cases, some of which are things that people have asked for directly -- and some are just things that we ourselves want to use. The overall hope is to make a great product that people enjoy using, more than anything else :)
Congrats, John!
It was really fast to get from 1.0 to 2.0. 😊
Markdown has its own place but WYSIWYG experience has been matured, so I think it's a great move. How do you export the data though? Does Ghost 2.0 store posts as Markdown internally?
We store posts in a format called MobileDoc, which is an open JSON based standard that allows us to render/export posts to [almost anything] :) HTML/XML/NewsML/Etc
Ooo that's rad! 😆 Didn't know that Ghost 1.0 implemented MobileDoc already. Nice work! 👍
Posted on HN but gonna post here, too, because I've been such a big fan of yours over the years. Great work. Best wishes to you and your team, John.
Thanks so much Ryan!
Heck yes, nice work John!
John didnt post it here, but Ghost 2.0 is on Product Hunt today as well: https://www.producthunt.com/posts/ghost-2-0
Just gave you an upvote :)
Haha, thanks Davis! Much appreciated
Awesome, congrats! It looks really good 🎉
I wish you had a free tier though to get someone started more easily. Might end up hosting it myself :)
Self-hosting is the free tier 🤗but it's even better cause you also get all the rights to use or modify the code however you want, of course
Actually fairly to run yourself easy these days with our CLI + Digital Ocean: https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-set-up-the-digitalocean-ghost-one-click-application-for-ubuntu-16-04 - almost everything is automated :)
Yeah :)
Do you have a docker image? Im running most things in Kubernetes so it would be extremely easy for me to just spin up a image in the cluster
Sure do - https://hub.docker.com/_/ghost/ - it's a community package though, so usually lags slightly behind main releases
Cool, I will check it out :)
Looks Good, John! Congrats!
Cheers Josh!
Hey, this is great news. I used to recommend ghost to people who ‘just need a simple site’ as I could teach them markdown and let them look after their own content. My installation process became a ‘how to’ blog for CentOS 6. At some point (CentOS 7 maybe) the installation overhead started to outweigh the advantages, so I moved on from Ghost to Strapdown. Looking forward to trying out ghost 2 !
Does it have plugins as wordpress?