You may have noticed based on tweets that I’ve been using Ghost daily (mostly) for a little while now, trying to get a feel for it vs WordPress.
You know what? With the exception of wanting to kill people while I was installing it, I really, really, like it for simple blogging.
The editor is a delight, plain and simple. It’s fast. Super fast. There’s nothing dragging it down man. Which ironically is where it loses.
You see, there’s no extendability. It’s like the Old Days of WP, where I have to edit a theme to make widgets. Oh and no apps right now.
Not to mention the drama of installing. It sucks for self hosted. This continues down to installing themes (sucks) and apps (non-existent). You have to reboot the Ghost ‘node’ after every change too. This is not tenable for most people and highlights the need for apps. Oh. Yeah. Apps are a thing that Ghost needs, stat.
Right now, they’ve added in a way to add code to your header and footer without needing to edit themes, which means I was able to put in my Google Analytics code easily.
Ghost is Ghost. WordPress is WordPress. For what I do, WP is right. For plain, simple, blogging, Ghost is good except for the Markdown aspect. I’ve got the hang on it, but it’s been nine years and I doubt it’s ever going to be ‘the thing.’ HTML wins for many reasons.
So what do I want from Ghost into WordPress? That damn editor! Seriously.
The content on the left and preview on the right is great. It live updates and I can see what things look like in the Visual editor while having full code control like the HTML editor. In addition, there’s no place to put in the tags or featured images or anything other than content. Until I click on that gear.
That is slick. And it works great on mobile too. Compared to the fade out and off center DFW editor in WP, which is pretty great, it’s awesome.
Of course I looked at the available plugins for WordPress
Gust Plugin – This looked great, but it doesn’t work on Multisite. On WP 4.2 it threw this:
Fatal error: Cannot redeclare get_avatar_url() (previously declared in /wp-includes/link-template.php:3414) in /wp-content/plugins/gust/gust.php on line 202
Then there’s Splitdown – Not updated in a year and also errors:
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STATIC, expecting ')' in /wp-content/plugins/Splitdown-master/Splitdown.php on line 19
Finally we get to PrettyPress – This isn’t a ‘Ghost’ plugin exactly but it makes a second ‘editor’ you can flip into. No save button there, but as an editor it’s rather nice.
At this point, I’m resigned to not having that kind of slick editor in WordPress. I do think it’s a nicer direction than ‘distraction free’ as it’s actually fewer distractions. All I see is my content and a preview.
