Ghost is probably the most famous and the best headless content publication solution. This tutorial series is planned to teach those people to create a Ghost powered website from scratch.

Compare to the well-known WordPress, Ghost is a simple way for all content creators, even though it might be hard for those who have zero web-based development experience to set it up and running.

Although there are several static site generators (e.g. Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby...) you can check out if that suits your needs. I will probably create another series regarding that.

Who need a Ghost website?

Generally speaking, Ghost is for anyone who loves creating contents. That being said, it is not limited to the creative industry and arts practitioners, programmers and scholars are also using it to spread their works and ideas. Following are some examples:

  • Education YouTubers - it could be hard and time-consuming to put everything into a video. A blog or website will be a good supplement for details and documentations. And it is quite easy to embed videos from YouTube etc.
  • Writers - it is important to keep yourself focused on what you are writing. You can write articles with Ghost's powerful but easy to use editor with markdown enabled. Ghost provides native apps to your devices so you don't have to open it on your browser. (https://ghost.org/downloads/)
  • Scholars - have a place to share your work is the most crucial part of doing research. Ghost is a professional platform for accomplishing this job.
  • Photographer & Designers - Ghost allows you to publish your photos by either direct upload or embedding from other platforms like Instagram etc. Having some good stories to talk about is always appealing, right?
  • Developers - you always have some good ideas and projects that may become enormous one day (like Linux). Other than GitHub, why not have some place and write them down for not only you but someone who might benefit from it.

The list goes on. Actually everyone could have a website or blog that is independent to any other big commercial platforms. My experience tells me that if your words are spread through others, they will not be the same as you wanted to say.

What will I get?

An example is this website itself, it uses Ghost as the content management system. I have also built the current blogging theme the Fizzy Theme just for it, you can download it for free. If you like it, please star this project on its GitHub repo: Fizzy-Theme.

But of course, it is not limited to what this blog has, after this tutorial, you should be able to explore Ghost by yourself with confidence.

Glossaries

  • CMS (Content Management System) - something enables you to manage and publish your content, e.g. WordPress.
  • Headless CMS - the main drawback of traditional CMS is that everything is in one place. In the past, people think that's a good thing since you have everything sort of control in a single place. But due to the thrive of multi-platform browsing, your content could be mispositioned in mobile devices, and problems could go wrong seriously when everyone is doing different things in one place. The headless CMS is driven by APIs (application programming interface), so content is saved in a warehouse (database) and can be fetched through APIs. Thus different roles of people do things by using different APIs, and front-end design can be responsive to platforms. Read others explanation: why headless cms is becoming so popular.
  • JAM Stack - it is the most popular headless stack, "JAM" stands for JavaScript, APIs and Markup. You can read more at jamstack.org, and yes Ghost is a JAM Stack solution.

Finally, love what you do.