Ghost 3.0, an open-source headless Node.js CMS, released with JAMStack integration, GitHub Actions, and more!

Yesterday, the team behind Ghost, an open-source headless Node.js CMS, announced its major version, Ghost 3.0. The new version represents “a total of more than 15,000 commits across almost 300 releases” 

Ghost is now used by the likes of Apple, DuckDuckGo, OpenAI, The Stanford Review, Mozilla, Cloudflare, Digital Ocean, and many, others. “To date, Ghost has made $5,000,000 in customer revenue whilst maintaining complete independence and giving away 0% of the business,” the official website highlights.

https://twitter.com/Ghost/status/1186613938697338881

What’s new in Ghost 3.0?

Ghost on the JAMStack

The team has revamped the traditional architecture using JAMStack which makes Ghost a completely decoupled headless CMS. In this way, users can generate a static site and later add dynamic features to make it powerful. The new architecture unlocks content management that is fundamentally built via APIs, webhooks, and frameworks to generate robust modern websites.

Continuous theme deployments with GitHub Actions

The process of manually making a zip, navigating to Ghost Admin, and uploading an update in the browser can be difficult at times. To deploy Ghost themes to production in a better way, the team decided to combine with Github Actions. This makes it easy to continuously sync custom Ghost themes to live production sites with every new commit.

New WordPress migration plugin

Earlier versions of Ghost included a very basic WordPress migrator plugin that made it extremely difficult for anyone to move their data between the platforms or have a smooth experience.

The new Ghost 3.0 compatible WordPress migration plugin provides a single-button-download of the full WordPress content + image archive in a format that can be dragged and dropped into Ghost's importer.

Those who are new and want to explore Ghost 3.0 can create a new site in a few clicks with an unrestricted 14 day free trial as all new sites on Ghost (Pro) are running Ghost 3.0.

The team expects users to try out Ghost 3.0 and get back with feedback for the team on the Ghost forum or help out on Github for building the next features with the Ghost team.

Ben Thompson’s Stratechery, a subscription-based newsletter featuring in-depth commentary on tech and media news, recently posted an interview with Ghost CEO John O’Nolan. This interview features questions on what Ghost is, where it came from, and much more.

Ghost 3.0 has received a positive response from many and also the fact that it is moving towards adopting static site JAMStack approach. A user on Hacker News commented, “In my experience, Ghost has been the no-nonsense blog CMS that has been stable and just worked with very little maintenance. I like that they are now moving towards static site JAMStack approach, driven by APIs rather than the current SSR model. This lets anybody to customise their themes with the language / framework of choice and generating static builds that can be cached for improved loading times.”

Another user who is using Ghost for the first time commented, “I've never tried Ghost, although their website always appealed to me (one of the best designed website I know). I've been using WordPress for the past 13 years, for personal and also professional projects, which means the familiarity I've built with building custom themes never drew me towards trying another CMS.

But going through this blog post announcement, I saw that Ghost can be used as a headless CMS with frontend frameworks. And since I started using GatsbyJS extensively in the past year, it seems like something that would work _really_ well together. Gonna try it out! And congrats on remaining true to your initial philosophy.”

To know more about the other features in detail, read the official blog post.

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