Ghost is a free and open source

blog A blog (a truncation of "weblog") is a discussion or informational website published on the World Wide Web consisting of discrete, often informal diary-style text entries (posts). Posts are typically displayed in reverse chronological order s ...

ging platform written in

JavaScript JavaScript (), often abbreviated as JS, is a programming language that is one of the core technologies of the World Wide Web, alongside HTML and CSS. As of 2022, 98% of websites use JavaScript on the client side for webpage behavior, of ...

and distributed under the

MIT License The MIT License is a permissive free software license originating at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in the late 1980s. As a permissive license, it puts only very limited restriction on reuse and has, therefore, high license comp ...

, designed to simplify the process of online publishing for individual bloggers as well as online publications. The concept of the Ghost platform was first floated publicly in November 2012 in a blog post by project founder John O'Nolan, which generated enough response to justify coding a prototype version with collaborator Hannah Wolfe. The first public version of Ghost, released October 2013, was financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign which achieved its initial funding goal of £25,000 in 11 hours and went on to raise a final total of £196,362 during the 29-day campaign.

History

The idea for the Ghost platform was first written about at the start of November 2012, in a blog post by project founder John O'Nolan, the former deputy lead for the

WordPress WordPress (WP or WordPress.org) is a free and open-source content management system (CMS) written in hypertext preprocessor language and paired with a MySQL or MariaDB database with supported HTTPS. Features include a plugin architecture ...

User Interface team, after becoming frustrated with the complexity of using WordPress as a

rather than a content management system. Following considerable demand and positive feedback from the community on the initial blog post, O'Nolan recruited long-time friend Hannah Wolfe to help him create an initial prototype of the platform. On April 29, 2013 – O'Nolan released a video of the prototype in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter with a goal of £25,000 to fund the completion of initial development work. The project was successfully funded in 11 hours and went on to raise a final total of £196,362 during the 29-day campaign. The project relied on backing both from individuals as well as sponsorship from companies who had an interest in seeing the platform succeed. Notable backers included

Seth Godin Seth W. Godin is an American author and former dot com business executive. Background After leaving Spinnaker in 1986, he used $20,000 in savings to found Seth Godin Productions, primarily a book packaging business, out of a studio apartment i ...

, Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse,

Tucker Max Tucker Max (born September 27, 1975) is an American author and public speaker. He chronicles his drinking and sexual encounters in the form of short stories on his website ''TuckerMax.com'', which has received millions of visitors since Max lau ...

, major companies such as Woo-Themes, Envato, and

Microsoft Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology corporation producing computer software, consumer electronics, personal computers, and related services headquartered at the Microsoft Redmond campus located in Redmond, Washin ...

. On September 19, 2013 – The first public version of Ghost was released, named Kerouac as an early release to people who had backed the Kickstarter campaign. On October 14, 2013 – Ghost was made available for the first time as an extended-release to the general public via

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continu ...

as of version 0.3.3 – amended with bugfixes and security updates. Some notable platform users include IBM,

Tinder Tinder is easily combustible material used to start a fire. Tinder is a finely divided, open material which will begin to glow under a shower of sparks. Air is gently wafted over the glowing tinder until it bursts into flame. The flaming tinder i ...

, Sky News,

VEVO Vevo ( , an abbreviation for "Video Evolution", stylized as VEVO until 2013) is an American multinational video hosting service, best known for providing music videos to YouTube. The service is also available as an app on selected smart TVs, ...

, and

Zappos Zappos.com is an American online shoe and clothing retailer based in Las Vegas, Nevada, United States. The company was founded in 1999 by Nick Swinmurn and launched under the domain name Shoesite.com. In July 2009, Amazon acquired Zappos in an ...

Ghost Foundation

The Ghost project is managed by a

nonprofit organization A nonprofit organization (NPO) or non-profit organisation, also known as a non-business entity, not-for-profit organization, or nonprofit institution, is a legal entity organized and operated for a collective, public or social benefit, in co ...

headquartered in

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, bor ...

called the Ghost Foundation, which was established following the Kickstarter campaign. The foundation currently employs 25 full-time members of staff to work on the Ghost project and the surrounding community infrastructure.

Business model

The Ghost blogging software is free to download and use. In addition, the Foundation offers a paid hosted platform for users who would like to run a live blog on the

World Wide Web The World Wide Web (WWW), commonly known as the Web, is an information system enabling documents and other web resources to be accessed over the Internet. Documents and downloadable media are made available to the network through web ...

, as an alternative to configuring a server and running a manual install of the software package. For a monthly fee, users receive an account with fully managed Ghost blogs with automatic backups and updates as well as email support. As the hosted platform is owned and operated by the Ghost Foundation, all revenue generated from the service is subsequently used to fund further development of the open source software and the project's infrastructure.

Platform

Ghost is coded in

Node.js Node.js is an open-source server environment. Node.js is cross-platform and runs on Windows, Linux, Unix, and macOS. Node.js is a back-end JavaScript runtime environment. Node.js runs on the V8 JavaScript Engine and executes JavaScript code o ...

, a server-side

execution engine, and an Ember.js admin client. Since version 2.0, posts can be written using a

WYSIWYG In computing, WYSIWYG ( ), an acronym for What You See Is What You Get, is a system in which editing software allows content to be edited in a form that resembles its appearance when printed or displayed as a finished product, such as a printed d ...

editor; in earlier versions, only

Markdown Markdown is a lightweight markup language for creating formatted text using a plain-text editor. John Gruber and Aaron Swartz created Markdown in 2004 as a markup language that is appealing to human readers in its source code form. Markdown i ...

was supported. Ghost CMS ( Content Management System) can be used as either a traditional or headless CMS.

Security

On May 3, 2020, Ghost confirmed that its Ghost(Pro) platform was infected with crypto-mining malware. The virus affected both Ghost(Pro) servers and Ghost.org billing services. No user data was compromised, and user credentials were not stored in plain text.Winder, Davey. https://www.forbes.com/sites/daveywinder/2020/05/03/ghost-confirms-hack-attack-750000-users-spooked-by-critical-vulnerability/ ''Forbes''. Retrieved 2020-05-15.

References

External links

*{{Official website *https://techlimbs.com/how-to-make-money-online-for-beginners/#44-ghost-blogging *https://themeix.com/product/category/ghost-themes/ Blog software Free software programmed in JavaScript Kickstarter-funded software Blog hosting services Free content management systems