A few years ago I took a look at Ghost, another take on a blogging/publishing platform. Around that time I was looking for an alternative to Wordpress, a modern alternative that focused on deliverying content rather than worrying about caching your site. Unforunately, back then, it was version 0, essentially a beta, and I decided the product wasn’t ready. Now we’re here in 2019 and this site has moved to Ghost.

Why move now?

When I looked at Ghost a few years back the platform was very promising. It’s focus was on simplicity for both the reader and the publisher. However, as simple as it was there were a lot of features missing. It’s very easy to lose yourself in the world of Wordpress with it’s plugins and themes. There’s also the issue of understanding Nodejs. I’m not a developer and I didn’t want to understand how to use another technology back then.

Moving forward to 2019 and Ghost has moved on a couple of versions. There’s been a lot of enhancements, a lot of code reworks but Ghost is in a position whereby it is a very viable alternative to Wordpress, at least in my opinion. You’re not going to migrate every single feature or function over, depending on your Wordpress set up, but you will have a great time creating content for your readers.

The main reason for moving was how dreadful the performance of Wordpress is. No wonder why there are a lot of caching or plugins to convert your posts and pages into static content. It’s 2019 and I couldn’t be dealing with a platform that was taking longer than 1000ms to load for guest readers.

There was the issue of not being able to upload or to install plugins and themes, or to update Wordpress in the admin dashboard due to the way App Engine Standard functions. I understand this limitation but there are limitations to the design of Wordpress.

Lastly, one of the best features is Markdown. Markdown allows you to format your content without using the mouse. You can create headers, ordered lists, numbered lists, bold or italisise your text with ease and with your keyboard only. This ensures you are focused on your writing instead of formatting your post.

Features

As well as the increase in performance over Wordpress there are lots of other features Ghost has that Wordpress doesn’t. I’ll touch upon a few.

• markdown support
• quickly make your site private
• easily and quickly publish content
• night mode for the admin panel
• integration into other platforms
• great support for mobile

Migrating is the worst

Migrating the same site from one location to another is never straight forward, no matter how much planning you do. Migrating from one platform to another is more difficult.

Migrating from Wordpress to Ghost v2 is a little painful and tedious, even for a tiny site like this one. The problem with migrating is the official Ghost exporter plugin. When importing the data from the Wordpress plugin it can only be imported into a Ghost version of v1, not v2. This means you have to import your data into Ghost v1 then upgrade to Ghost v2. It’s not that difficult to do but it could be simpler.

There’s also the other quirks that adds time to the migration process…

• exporter adding additional HTML randomly
• exporter not naming the correct location of your images

Is it worth it?

Yes, at least in my opinion.

What technologies am I now using?

You’ll be pleased to know the migration of Wordpress to App Engine was not a waste of time. This website is still being ran in App Engine but the base is Nodejs v10 running on a flex environment instead of Standard. I tried to use the Standard environment but Ghost requires to write files to the system.

I’ve installed a GCP Cloud Storage adapter to write any uploaded images to a Storage bucket. This bucket is linked to a Cloud CDN service ensuring the images are delivered quickly.

Overall, I am happy with the transition to Ghost and I look forward to using it for the years to come. #thisarticlewaswrittenusingGhost