As of this week, we've updated our recommended version of Node.js for Ghost to be Node.js v4 LTS.

We're doing this a little later than planned. However, after much testing we are now confident that Ghost on v4 runs smoothly and with a smaller initial memory footprint than it did previously. Every single blog on Ghost(Pro) now runs on Node.js v4 LTS and we had zero problems upgrading everyone 😅 🎉

Why upgrade?

Having upgraded everyone on Ghost(Pro) blogs, we've found that the base memory footprint for a Ghost blog is now under 100mb ⚡️ (NB: Your mileage may vary based on theme, content, traffic, and environment)

The Node.js LTS schedule means the 0.10.x line will reach end of life on 1st October 2016. Ghost will be following this schedule, meaning the next upgrade released on or after October 1st will no longer support being run on 0.10.x. Support for Node.js 0.12.x will end in a similar fashion on the 31st December 2016.

If you self-host Ghost, you should plan to upgrade in the next 3 months. We recommend upgrading Node.js independently of upgrading Ghost to make any issues easier to debug.

How to upgrade

Upgrading your Ghost install from an older version of Node.js to v4 is a 4 step process:

1. Backup!
2. Upgrade the Node.js version on your server
3. Run npm install --production inside the Ghost directory to ensure that the binary dependencies are recompiled for Node.js v4 LTS
4. Restart Ghost

If you're using a Digital Ocean droplet, you can learn how to upgrade Node.js on a one-click install of Ghost from this excellent Q & A post.

More details

If you really want the meat and potatoes:

• Node.js Official LTS Schedule
• Ghost's Supported Node Versions
• Details of the switch on GitHub

Quick Summary

The initial version of both internal tags and post scheduling has been merged in. Lots of dependency updates and fixes, and a beta 2 release of 0.9.0 is planned for later this week.

Ghost:

Ghost-Admin:

Progress Report

• Post Scheduling - #25, #6861, #6987, #6988
• Internal Tags - #58, #64, #6771
• Timezones - #6941, #6966, #6962, #6981, #6983, #47
• Fixes - #6938, #6924, #6936, #6952, #6955, #6929, #6945, #62, #63
• General Improvements - #6928, #6909, #6943, #6956, #6960, #6959, #6961, #6963, #49, #55
• Dependency Updates - #6947, #6951, #6965, #6925, #6973, #48, #50, #52, #53, #54, #56, #59, #61, #66

Discussion

• Work on updating bookshelf to use lodash 4 because the ghost lodash 4 update breaks installations on npm v2 - #1287
• Work on Clients API - #6674
• Work on validations refactor - #17
• Release of 0.9.0 beta 2 imminent

The full logs of the meeting can be found in our Slack logs.

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #dev channel on Ghost's slack. In this meeting we discuss progress, important issues, and what is and isn't on the Roadmap. It's a chance for everyone to get involved and have their say about where Ghost goes next.

Hope to see you at next week's meeting: Tuesday 21st June, 5:30pm London time.

As hinted at a few weeks ago in our 3rd birthday post, you can now send posts from Ghost directly into your Slack team via a simple webhook integration!

This is our very first mini-app for Ghost, which is especially helpful for keeping your whole team up to date on what's being published on the blog. It also comes in particularly handy if you use a private/internal blog instead of Slack posts!

We're planning to add more integrations and apps like this, as well as more powerful customisations for each one. The aim here is to make Ghost the central point of all your publishing efforts which everything else can integrate with.

Better Structured Data

On top of that, we've also just updated Ghost's structured data support to be much more powerful. You can now enter Facebook and Twitter profile URLs for both your blog, as well as each one of your users. This means that you'll see more rich data when embedding posts on social networks, like Facebook:

And, places like Twitter will start to give you much more rich analytics data about how the content in your tweets is being engaged with, so you'll have a better understanding of how your audience is responding to the content which you publish:

Of course Ghost also automatically renders all of this Schema.org friendly microformats, to make your publication 100% Google-friendly. No additional HTML markup or attributes required in your theme, it just works straight out of the box.

[New:] Email Subscriber Management

We're currently testing a set of features which integrate blog email subscribers directly into Ghost. If you run an active publication and would like to be a part of the early beta, please get in touch and let me know.

Enjoy the new things!

Ghost 0.8.0 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. Ghost 0.8.0 contains a major database upgrade, some breaking changes to the theme API and several new features for you to test out.

Highlights

• [New] Subscribers (Beta) - enable in labs to collect email addresses from your blog
• [New] Slack integration - notify a slack channel whenever a new blog post is published
• [New] Twitter & Facebook support - add your social profiles to your blog and users, get a meta data boost
• [New] HTTP2 Preload headers - get super speed with CloudFlare
• [Changed] Image uploader - improved editor performance and a smoother upload experience
• [Changed] theme API breaking changes - see here for the details
• [Fixed] Errors in JSON-LD structured data output on blog posts & author pages
• And much, much more...

You can see the full change log for the details of every change included in this release.

In Detail

This release contains some new features and all of the theming & API tools needed to make the most of them.

The new slack integration allows you to automatically post to slack when a post is published. This feature will likely move to an internal app, and then a default installed external app over the coming months. This is our first experiment with integrations and we're looking to do more.

The subscribers feature is implemented, as much as possible, as an internal app. The tools it provides, such as the subscribe page, theme helpers & API endpoint, are only available when the feature is enabled in labs and there's a new helper for detecting if it is enabled from within a theme as well. See the support guide and theme docs for more details.

Twitter & facebook fields have been added both to users, and to the general settings screen. These store only the unique part of the URL - the twitter username and facebook page name or username. These values are available via the API and also in themes, where helpers have been added to create URLs.

Support for HTTP2 Preload headers have been added, but are currently off by default. To enable them, you need to set preloadHeaders to a numerical value in your config.js file, where the value represents the number of entries stored in the cache: e.g.

production: {
  url: 'https://my-ghost-blog.com',
  preloadHeaders: 100,
  ...
}

Long term, this feature will likely be enabled by default. Short term, users on Ghost(Pro) can contact [email protected] to ask for this feature to be enabled.

Theme API Changes

Breaking Changes

The breaking changes to the theme API are explained in detail in this blog post.

Other Changes

The theme API has a few additions in 0.8.0 in line with the new feature additions:

• The new {{@labs}} global allows you to detect if a labs feature is enabled.
• Both {{@blog}} and {{author}} now have twitter and facebook properties which contain the unique username / page name provided in the admin panel. Two new helpers: {{facebook_url}} and {{twitter_url}} have been added to make it easy to convert the usernames into full URLs in themes.
• You can now add a new subscribe.hbs template to override the one provided by Ghost when the subscribers feature is enabled in labs. This comes with a full suite of helpers such as {{subscribe_form}} as well as adding a new context.

See the theme API docs for full details of what changed in Ghost 0.8.0. The theme documentation is frequently updated with more details and better examples. Please also use the suggest edits feature if you find something is missing or out of date.

Public API Changes

The addition (and removal) of several new database fields in Ghost 0.8.0 will result in minor changes to the Public API:

• posts, tags and users all now have a visibility field
• tags no longer have a hidden field
• users & settings contains a twitter & facebook field
• posts have a currently unused mobiledoc field

As the hidden field was not yet in use, this is not expected to result in any breaking changes.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.8.0 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.8.0 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, Kevin Ansfield, Austin Burdine, Katharina Irrgang, Aileen Nowak, Jason Williams, Joerg Henning, Sebastian Gierlinger, Terin Stock, David Balderston and Brian Tedder.

Ghost 0.8.0 is set to land soon, and with it come a few breaking changes to how the theme API works. These changes come from upgrades to the underlying handlebars and express-hbs libraries. As the changes affect rare use cases, they should not impact on many themes. This post is a guide on what has changed and how to check if your theme will be affected.

TLDR; The three breaking changes in 0.8.0

1. All partial files MUST use the .hbs file extension.
2. Handlebars helpers provided to HTML attributes MUST be quoted, e.g. <div class="{{post_class}}">
3. ../ in handlebars now behaves naturally and doesn't require multiples when using nested if statements.

The first two changes lock down behaviour that is considered bad practice and are easy to spot. The change to ../ probably only affects you if you've had to unexpectedly use multiples (e.g. {{../../pagination.total}}) to retrieve a value in your theme.

In detail...

Here's a full breakdown of what's changing, why, how to fix and how to find more information. If you have any questions please drop by the #themes channel on the Ghost slack community.

1. Partials now require the .hbs extension

Previously, there was no enforcement around the file extension used for partial files, although the extension .hbs is what has been documented and expected.

This lack of enforcement has caused problems, for example some editors create backup files with names like loob.hbs~, loop.hbs.bk or loop.hbs.swp and these backup files can be loaded by Ghost instead of the correct file. The result is frustrating issues where changes to template files don't appear to work no matter what you change! Matching the file extension exactly fixes the issue, but also has the side effect of requiring the extension be correct.

Impact: Any partial which has an incorrect extension will not be found after the upgrade and this could cause problems rendering pages of a blog. Additionally backup files which were previously incorrectly rendered will be dropped in favour of the correct file.

Solution: Check your /partials/ directory for any file with an extension other than .hbs. Look for any sort of backup file and check that the correct file is being rendered already, if not it will be after 0.8.0 so be sure you're happy with that change.

You can find out more about this change from the Ghost bug that it fixes, and also the pull request which solves the underlying problem.

2. Handlebars helpers passed to HTML attributes must be quoted

It has always been best practice to use quotes to surround any handlebars being passed to an HTML attribute, for example:

<div class="{{post_class}}"> or <time datetime="{{date format="YYYY-MM-DD"}}">

In 0.8.0 we're upgrading to the latest version of handlebars (v4.0.5). This version additionally HTML escapes the = symbol in order to prevent XSS attacks and address a potential security risk. This addition makes it even more important to always use quotes when passing handlebars helpers to HTML attributes.

Impact: Following this change, in any case where quotes are not used and the value includes an =, the = will now be HTML escaped. This will cause minor rendering issues in templates.

For example, imagine outputting a link to a post which has the title "Me => Abroad":

<a href={{url}} title={{title}}>click me</a>

This would result in HTML like:

<a ... title="Me" =&gt;="" abroad="">click me</a>. The url will be output correctly as it cannot contain a = character, but the title will not be output correctly. This is incorrect but will not stop the page loading or link working.

Solution: Search your theme for handlebars helpers not being quoted, E.g. search for instances of ={{. If you find any, it is recommended to add double quotes as you normally would with HTML.

More information can be found in the handlebars pull request and in the handlebars v4 compatibility notes.

3. handlebars ../ paths now behave naturally

If used in a file system, the path expression ../ means go back one folder. It's not needed often in Ghost, but handlebars has a similar path syntax e.g. {{../pagination.total}} that is intended to let you reference values up one level in the tree of JSON data associated with a template. However, in the previous versions of handlebars, there were cases where ../ didn't go back one level as you'd expect and the expression would need repeating like ../../.

This case most commonly happened with the combination of opening a block and also using an if statement. In this situation, handlebars was not working as you would expect. Take the following example:

{{#tag}}
  {{#if description}}
    {{description}}
  {{else}}
    A {{???pagination.total}}-post collection
  {{/if}}
{{/tag}}

Here, the pagination object is one level higher than the tag object we're currently inside be cause we opened a {{#tag}}{{/tag}} block. So to output the pagination total we'd expect to have to do {{../pagination.total}}. However, handlebars would get confused by the {{#if}} and require you to go back twice to get to pagination, e.g. {{../../pagination.total}}. This is really unnatural, and this behaviour has been fixed in Handlebars v4.

Impact: Anywhere where extra ../'s were added to work around this problem will result in the wrong data (or rather no data) being output after the upgrade to 0.8.0.

Solution: Check your theme templates and partials for places where ../ is used in a nested block. In most cases, it will be instances of multiple ../'s e.g. {{../../pagination.total}} that felt unnatural in the first place. You can remove any additional instances of ../ as these won't be needed any more.

Update 13/05: The easiest way to fix this issue, is to use {{@root.pagination.total}} to reference the root of the JSON data first, and reference pagination from there.

The full explanation & discussion around this change can be found in the original handlebars issue.

Ghost 0.7.9 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.7.9 contains lots of bug fixes, upgrades, improvements and tweaks that you mostly shouldn't notice 😊 and one breaking change for some people using the Public API Beta...

Highlights

• [Improved] Static pages now have structured data, just like posts, so they will pass validation for twitter cards and other social media sharing tools.
• [Improved] Relaxed CORS handling, meaning less people should have issues logging in to their blog if their URL isn't configured exactly right.
• [Improved] Draft post slugs (urls) are updated when the title changes, so that you don't get weird half-titles in slugs anymore.
• [Fixed] Static files immediately result in a 404, because trying a filename with a trailing slash on the end is never going to result in a happier ending.
• [Fixed] Incorrect preview link & icon position in the editor making it easier to preview your post by clicking the word "preview" at the bottom of the editor.
• [Fixed] Requesting url as a field from the Posts API didn't return the correct response (Public API Beta).
• [Changed] Trusted domains now require their protocol be included. See below for details (Public API Beta).
• And much more...

You can see the full change log for the details of every change included in this release.

In Detail

We improved the Public API beta in this release.

Public API Beta Changes

Breaking Change

If you've enabled the Public API Beta flag in labs and added a trusted domain to your database, there's a breaking change for you in this release. This change will not affect anyone else.

Trusted domains must now include the protocol. So where previously you may have added ghost.org as your trusted domain in the client_trusted_domains table, the domain will need to be updated to https://ghost.org once you upgrade to 0.7.9. If you need both http & https, then you will need two rows in the database.

If you are running on Ghost(Pro) this change should have already been made for you. Any problems, please contact [email protected] as usual 👻

Other Changes

It is now possible to request url as a field from the posts endpoint. E.g. {{#get "posts" fields="title, url"}} will now return the correct result. Previously url was not returned due to it being a computed property.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.7.9 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.7.9 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, Kevin Ansfield, Jason Williams, Austin Burdine, David Balderston, Peter Szel, king6cong, quangtt, JT Turner, Jeff Jewiss, Jeremiah Hoyet, Joerg Henning, cobbspur and Aileen Nowak.