Some fun technical details from this release:
- New features require building a routing map for all possible URLs on boot, which is a dramatically heavy operation. We were eventually forced to forgo our traditional ORM layer entirely to get any degree of performance (insert: shock/awe)
- Related: It turns out SQLite3 has a query limit of 999 SQL variables, so we had to implement a recursive query strategy for SQLite only. Wild. Default is MySQL though, which was fine.
- Conquered a pretty spectacular memory leak when running in development as a result of trace-logging promises in Bluebird, which is “a full featured promise library with unmatched performance” — …unless you implicitly enable debug traces
Also: Let me be the first to say that I can’t believe there’s still no Postgres support, which is absolutely outrageous.
On a serious note, thanks for all the support and there are several of us hanging out in the comments if anyone has technical questions which they’re curious about.
Out of pure technical curiosity, how did this come to be the chosen approach? A query with 999 variables strikes me as a serious code smell, but at the same time I don't doubt you guys seriously considered the alternatives before choosing this route.
Solvable, of course, but quite an interesting limitation to discover!
One of the main motivations for people using Medium is the network effect. I think it would be really cool if that could be recreated in a platform-agnostic, decentralised way :)
Postgres is open source.
Why do they owe you?
If it matters, write the code.
See: https://blog.ghost.org/dropping-support-for-postgresql/
He meant that he still hasn't taken the time to get some people in his team to support Postgres officially, I guess.
Would be amazing if I didn't need to know a completely separate technology and/or hack together bridges/site "staticizers" in order to have a quite basic functionality (the site be 100% static when no back-end dynamic interaction is needed).
That said, there are third party plugins for WordPress that do this. Don't know about ghost, but my hopes are for first-class support for this.
The makers of Ghost are here appreciating the benefits of comments but sadly they haven’t made there way to Ghost yet.
I’d love to move to Ghost from Wordpress but commenting is essential.
And no. 3rd party Garbage like Disqus isn’t a viable option.
In the meantime, Discourse[1] and Talk[2] are great options that can be self-hosted if needed and integrate well. If you look at them you can see the level of effort that is required to do commenting, moderation, and spam protection well at scale.
[0] https://forum.ghost.org/t/memberships-subscriptions/377 [1] https://www.discourse.org [2] https://coralproject.net/talk/
It's free and open source, beta software (more risky than those two others), I'm developing it. There's SaaS hosting (no ads, no tracking — costs money instead) for people who don't want to install on their own server.
Demo: https://www.kajmagnus.blog/new-embedded-comments, read about it: https://www.talkyard.io/blog-comments
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Curious about how you have in mind that built-in commenting will look & work. Disqus, Talk and Discourse are all fairly different from each other, right, and I'm a bit wondering which approach you'll take. B.t.w. looks interesting with SSO & full community integration.
The good thing about this tool is you can customize it the way you want it to look. The look and feel of the comments can match your website's design. You can use our simple javascript implementation and integrate it into your Ghost site. If you decide to stay on wordpress we do have a easy to use wordpress plugin too!
Please visit https://www.metype.com if you want to see the other products we provide. Do shoot us an email or chat with us on our site if you want to give it a shot or provide us feedback.
i remember someone linking isso[0] some time ago; haven't used it at all, but it came to mind (mostly because of the 'big data' comment on the landing page)
That being said, there are some decent Open Source Disqus clones out there you could probably use!
Reddit and HN topics become read-only after some time, so I'm not sure how they can replace blog comments.
Twitter for comments, I don't understand. I guess you link to your canonical tweet and people reply to it? I find threaded conversation on Twitter to be just about unbearable.
I suppose at that point, it's better for you for us to run it on our own hosting, though...?
Is it that much better than say, Squarespace?
The server is a 14€/month with 16G/Corei5 2,8Ghz/2To HDD/1GB bandwidth. When you take in account the 15€ annually for the domain name, it comes twice cheaper that ghost. You can also host other things on that, since Ghost takes up maybe 500M of ram.
The cli tool is very rigid. For some reason you cannot simply run ghost as the user ghost but you need some other user with sudo privileges to create the ghost user during the installation process. And if there's any problem at any point, it just breaks.
I will try the npm path[1] but it looks pretty arduous as well.
Is this a business decision to turn as many people as possible to the hosted version? Or is this just the state of node and modern web apps?
[1] https://docs.ghost.org/docs/using-ghost-as-an-npm-module
Ghost-CLI is an open source project, led and built almost entirely by contributors from the community.
The process is rigid because they don't have enough hands to support more variations in environment.
I help run a small publication with some friends and we've been having difficulties with Medium and think it's time to move to a new platform.
One problem we haven't figured out a solution to yet is importing our Medium articles into Ghost.
My current plan is to export the Medium articles, parse them, then insert them directly into the Ghost DB. Is this is a viable solution?
I guess I have two questions: - Is Medium import going to be a feature offered any time soon? - How does the SEO configuration/setting work? Is it set up on article access? on article publish? on article creation? Would inserting articles directly into the DB break this process?
Thanks!
IMO Medium should provide a real export format and not hold people hostage... but you'd have to convince them of that
Cards is a smart way to re-phrase the rich content without dipping into the "site builder" mould.
Nice work.
Also, one more thing I would like Ghost to improve is there SEO. My website hosted on DO is just 2-3 pages behind. Some of my posts don't even make it even the obvious meta and title.
I wonder if the 1.x -> 2.0 upgrade will be a simple ghost-cli command, or whether it will entail a complete reinstall on our Digital Ocean droplet?
Sphinx is great for building out an API reference, but there's so much more to a documentation website beyond that.
Anyone have insight into this idea?
Additionally, I can then throw the content up on GitHub pages or AWS S3 and cut down on hosting costs.
Lacking PHP experience, I've never felt that comfortable in WordPress, but I can't deny that It Just Works. Easy to install and there are millions of users for easy troubleshooting.
> You can now configure your site to support multi-lingual content served across unique URLs with SEO-friendly, semantic templates. Now you can publish in English, German, Spanish or just about anything!
About damn fucking time, pardon my language. Was a real deal breaker for some projects of mine.
I NEVER got a response from their support about my request. Just flat out ignored. Haven't been back since...
We're always happy to provide another free trial - or you can signup again with an email address variation.
From what I can tell they are a team of eight with one dedicated support person, I empathize immensely with her.
We do all of these things in core, rather than leaving it up to the theme, so that everyone gets consistently good SEO rather than being left up to the mercy of whatever the theme developer remembered to implement
Also if there are mods available to easily add features that are missing -- maybe, eg, arbitrary HTML header elements -- then that can make the system SEO friendly.
Here's the GitHub: https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost
