Questions & answers

Today is an exciting day! After about two years and three hundred thousand users, we've learned a tremendous amount about how people have been using Ghost. As a result, we've just shipped our first major user interface update.

Here it is:

This project has been a work in progress since the end of last year, and we're very excited to see it being used out in the wild.

The biggest change has been to the main structure and navigation within Ghost's admin. We were fast hitting the limits on the old top-nav placement. The new side-menu placement should provide some familiarity to most desktop applications, works better on mobile and, significantly, gives us a lot more space and flexibility to introduce upcoming new features. Winky face.

BTW it's also easier to find old posts now

After talking to hundreds of you recently, one of the most common frustrations mentioned in the old admin was that finding old posts was a real pain. To remedy this, we've added a magical new search box which will help you find any post in your archive in a matter of seconds.

Oh also, ProTip: If you're reading a post on your blog some time and you're all like "damn there's a typo!" – try throwing /edit on the end of the URL. Yep, that works.

Ghost(Pro) users already have access to all of this right now, log in to your blog and have a look! Users running Ghost on their own servers can grab this feature by upgrading to Ghost 0.7.

Quick Summary

Lots of fixes being put in getting ready for the release hopefully this week.

Progress Report

Non-Zelda:

• Signup screen using new profile image upload component - #5672
• Fix email address already in use bug - #5654
• Ghost will now say it has started in production on command line - #5651

Zelda:

• Work being done on the Zelda audit bugs/changes - #5652, #5660
• Tag component bug fixes - #5658
• Spinner bug fix - #5656

Priority Issues

• Everything in the Zelda milestone is considered a priority for the next release - #5314

Discussion

• Kevin Ansfield is Ghost - http://blog.ghost.org/kevin-ansfield/
• Ghost August Financial Update - http://blog.ghost.org/august-2015-update/

Full details:

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 #ghost 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 25th August, 5:30pm London time.

The time has come to remove jQuery from the {{ghost_foot}} helper.

Ghost's {{ghost_foot}} helper has provided a local copy of jQuery since the very first release of Ghost. At the time, it seemed like having easy access to jQuery would be beneficial for the majority of theme developers - making it something worth adding to core. However it has since become clear that this wasn't a great decision - it not being possible to customise this means many theme developers have been excluding the required {{ghost_foot}} helper.

In a near-future the next (0.7) version of Ghost, jQuery will be removed.

To mitigate the fact that many, many themes depend on jQuery and simply removing it would break countless blogs, we're going to remove it in such a way that only new blogs are affected. Existing blogs will have the <script> tag moved to the ghost_foot section of the Code Injection screen in Ghost.

If you're interested in following along with the technical whys and hows this will be done, you can follow along with the issue issue on GitHub. We'll make a further announcement here on the blog to let you know which version of Ghost will contain the switch.

How to Update Your Theme to be Forwards-Compatible

If you make and distribute themes for Ghost that depend on jQuery to function, you'll need to update them so that they become forwards compatible.

There is no harm in including jQuery twice (beyond the waste of resources), but it is possible to conditionally load jQuery if it doesn't exist already with a snippet like this:

<script type="text/javascript">
  if (typeof jQuery == 'undefined') {
    document.write('<script type="text/javascript" src="http://ajax.aspnetcdn.com/ajax/jQuery/jquery-1.7.1.min.js"></'+'script>');
  }
</script>

We highly recommend updating your themes to include jQuery themselves as soon as you can. Additionally, if you're a developer who has been dropping {{ghost_foot}} because of jQuery, please add it back! We'll soon be displaying warnings and errors for themes which fail to include the required helpers.

If you need any help or would like to chat about updating your themes, please drop by the #themes channel on our Slack community.

Update 24th Aug: jQuery will be removed from the next version of Ghost, which will be 0.7, and will be released VERY soon.

Ghost 0.6.4 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.6.4 contains a number of bug fixes, largely for features released in 0.6.3.

Highlights

• [Fixed] Caching issues with previews
• [Fixed] Password protection not redirecting to blog
• [Fixed] Multiple owners after import
• [Fixed] Ghost logo linking to wrong URL
• [Fixed] Invite email missing contact email address

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

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.6.4 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.6.4 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.6.4.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, cobbspur, Emerson Keenan, Joe Wegner, John Nguyen and Tushar Bhushan.

Ghost 0.6.3 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.6.3 includes some bug fixes and a couple of nice new features, including post previews :)

Highlights

• [New] Post previews
• [New] Password protected blogs
• [New] Custom author templates
• [Improved] Session length is now 7 days
• [Fixed] Word count in editor not counting non-latin chars
• [Fixed] Secure URLs in RSS when accessed via HTTPS
• [Fixed] Autosave causing post to be published
• [Fixed] Admin app errors when active theme missing

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

In Detail

In recent weeks, we've started to focus on refactoring the code which renders blog pages. This part of the codebase has been left unloved whilst we focused on the admin UI, and it's time to give it some much needed attention. The ongoing work is the first step towards making Channels a possibility.

By unifying the code that renders the index, tag and author 'channels' which exist in Ghost, we are reducing duplication as well as ensuring they all work consistently. As a result of this work, Ghost 0.6.3 adds the ability to specify a custom template for each author, as can already be done with tags.

Theme API Changes

There are two major additions to the theme API in Ghost 0.6.3.

The first is the addition of the custom author templates. Meaning that you can now add, for example, a author-hannah.hbs template to your theme and this will be used to render the author page if the author's slug matches hannah. This can be used to create individual author pages.

Secondly, Ghost 0.6.3 adds the new password protected blogs feature, which allows you to hide your blog behind a shared password - very useful whilst your blog is under construction etc. When this page is enabled, all visitors to your blog get sent to /private/ and shown a password form.

The new private page is treated as its own context. It can be customised by including a private.hbs template in your theme. {{#is 'private'}} will be true, and the {{body_class}} helper will output private-template. Full details can be found in the theme documentation.

See the theme API docs for more details of what changed in Ghost 0.6.3. The theme documentation is frequently updated with more details and better examples. Please also use the suggest edits feature if you see something that is missing.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.6.3 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.6.3 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.6.3.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Jason Williams, Hannah Wolfe, Austin Burdine, John O'Nolan, Paul Adam Davis, Robert Jackson, Matt Enlow, Sebastian Gierlinger, Wilhansen Li, Adrian Estrada, lmoe, Alex Kleissner, Artyom Fedenko, David Balderston, Fabian Miiro and Harry Hope.

Ghost 0.6.2 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. Whew, that was a bit embarrassing! Shortly after the release of Ghost 0.6.1 an eagle-eyed user noticed their next & previous post links had gone missing. We've gotten that fixed up in 0.6.2, and squished couple of other minor fixes in too.

Highlights

• [Fixed] Next and previous post helpers gone missing
• [Fixed] Casper: text styling issues

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

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.6.2 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.6.2 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x or 0.6.xˆ
Enjoy!

Credits

This release was speedily crafted by Hannah Wolfe & Sebastian Gierlinger

Ghost 0.6.1 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.6.1 is an incremental improvement to Ghost containing bug fixes for 0.6.0, along with an updated version of Casper also containing bug fixes.

Highlights

• [Fixed] Authors unable to access their profiles in the Ghost admin
• [Fixed] {{ghost_head}} causing an error on custom error pages
• [Fixed] Published button not updating to say "post" or "page" correctly
• [Fixed] {{author.email}} being incorrectly available in certain contexts
• [Fixed] Casper: layout problems with copyright & next/previous posts
• [Fixed] Casper: icon font caching

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

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.6.1 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.6.1 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.6.1.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, John O'Nolan, Paul Adam Davis and cobbspur.

Just last week we announced that we’ve made all of our revenue figures public in an effort towards more transparency as a business. Today we’re taking another step in that direction by making our Slack team public.

Last year, Slack took the world by storm as it exploded onto the internet with its simple but powerful group messaging application. We’ve been using it internally at the Ghost Foundation since the day of its public launch. But, it hasn’t been accessible to any of the wider Ghost community, who have been largely split between IRC and our forums.

We’re going to try a new approach: Inviting our entire community into Slack and centralising it in one simple place where you know that there will always be someone around to help, chat to, or offer insights. From developer chats and meetings to support request and theme discussion; it’s all going to be under one roof.

Making it all work

This is a bit of an experiment! A few other open source projects have transitioned to Slack recently and it has worked very well. There are also wider Slack-only communities popping up all the time, like #nomads, who have proved that you can made it work with an incredibly large and diverse group of people.

The prospect of opening up our office, as we consider it, is slightly daunting - but kind of cool.

Join The Ghost Slack Team

We’d love to chat with you! We hang out in Slack all day every day (and we're online right now!), so come say hi :)

Sometimes little things have a disproportionately large impact. I’m not sure why this seems to surprise me, at this point, but it never fails. Every time one of these rolls around I’m left going “Really? THAT did it?” - weird.

The last big measured improvement in Ghost’s onboarding process that we talked about was detecting events which improved conversion process the most - and then using targeted emails to drive more people to those “aha” moments. We found one event in particular which improved conversion rate by 1,000%.

Today’s change isn’t nearly as dramatic - but it’s also not nearly as complex. While the last test took a good 40-50 hours of design, development and extensive testing. This time we spent 30 minutes on adding one <div> to one page, and it gave us 25% bump in how many people try Ghost every day.

The Little Change That Could

Hannah and I sat down a couple of weeks ago to have a look at any quick wins we could make in helping new Ghost users get up to speed faster. We’ve played with various points in the conversion funnel, but on this occasion there was one which was bothering Hannah in particular.

97% of people who sign up on Ghost.org start a Ghost(Pro) trial, but only 60% of those people are then logging into their blog. This makes no sense.

I agreed with her.

We have a technical issue here which makes things extra complicated. Every Ghost blog on Ghost(Pro) is an individual install of Ghost. On the plus side, this gives you tons of freedom and control over how your blog runs. On the down side, it makes things a little more complex for the user.

One of the biggest challenges we have is guiding users through this process without - to be frank - confusing the shit out of them.

The Onboarding Steps

Here’s how the process looks:

1. Visit Ghost.org
2. Sign up
3. Create a blog
4. Set up that blog

Down to the 3rd screen, the conversion rate is 97%. Pretty good. However, only 60% of people ever made it to the 4th screen. A clear indication of a problem, and one which had been bothering Hannah for a long while.

Now, the “proper” solution to this problem is quite clear: Use Single-Sign-On between Ghost.org and Ghost blogs, so that you can authenticate between the two without the need for these extra screens in the middle. A totally seamless experience. This is the right way to do it. The only problem with that is that it’s a lot of work that needs to happen in Ghost, Ghost.org and Ghost(Pro) to make all the different pieces talk to each other. It's not a small piece of work.

We wanted to do something now to try and improve it, so we decided to do the most obvious thing possible: Tell people what to do next.

The Old Ghost(Pro) Manager

This was the old blog management screen on Ghost.org. Once you understand it, it makes sense: It’s a list of all your blogs, and this is the place where you can setup/shutdown and manage them. But when you’ve just started a new trial and all you see is one little list item… it’s not really clear what this is or what you’re supposed to do with it.

So, in the space of 30 minutes Hannah coded up a re-usable welcome message component for new users, while I designed and marked up the welcome message itself.

The New Ghost(Pro) Manager

Now, when you visit the dashboard for the first time, it looks like this. There’s a message telling you what’s going on, the blog is highlighted, and the next action we want you to take is literally throbbing in anticipation.

No A/B Testing - JFDI

At the beginning of the year I read a post by David Kadavy which systematically destroyed my faith in A/B testing in the space of about 900 words.

A/A Testing: How I increased conversions 300% by doing absolutely nothing

It’s a great read, and it made me question the statistical significance a lot of the A/B tests we’ve run. As a result, I’ve started thinking differently about how we run our conversion experiments.

In this instance, we had months worth of data showing consistent conversion at a rate of about 60% between starting a trial and setting up a blog. Here’s the week before we tried out the new welcome message, which is consistent with the overall historical rates:

There was really no point in running a side-by-side A/B sample. We already had A, so we just went ahead and shipped B to see what would happen.

Hypothesis: To establish statistical significance, we would want to see the conversion rate be at least 10% higher than the previous average, consistently (every single day).

The week after adding the new welcome message:

The first week showed 7 consecutive days of improvement at an average of 76%, some 25% higher than the original average. This streak has continued to 20 days now, and is showing no signs of changing.

If you think 25% doesn’t sound like anything to get excited about, let’s look at how a small change compounds over time with some projected numbers:

This improvement gets us an extra 0.84 customers per day, and our average Ghost(Pro) customer Lifetime Value is currently about $200. Basic napkin maths – 365 days * ($200 * 0.84) – says that this change will be worth $61,000 in additional customers each year.

Not bad, for 30 minutes work.

For a non-profit organisation like Ghost, 100% of that extra revenue goes back into the business and makes a massive difference to how much good we’re able to do.

Dat Low Hanging Fruit

When people talk about making better software, they often mention “low hanging fruit”. Do the easy things first! They say. Find the small changes which will have the most impact, and save the complicated stuff until later.

The problem with this advice is that it’s really not always obvious what the low hanging fruit is. Much like I mentioned in the last onboarding post: If you don’t know what the “aha” moments are, you can’t optimise for them.

So the biggest lesson from this post, I think, is simple: When it comes the UX of completing a task; test the most basic thing. Spell out (use your words!) what you want the user to do next.

Compounding returns mean that a small change can make a very significant difference over time.

Ghost 0.5.10 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. We're back to our shorter release cycles, Ghost 0.5.10 is an incremental update containing several small improvements and fixes as well as tentative support for Node v0.12 and io.js-v1.2.

Highlights

• [New] User help menu
• [New] Support for Node v0.12 & io.js-v1.2
• [Fixed] Trailing slashes added to images in RSS feed
• [Fixed] Navigation menu display issue in Firefox and IE
• [Fixed] Navigation menu support for mailto links
• [Fixed] Emoji appearing instead of icons on iPad

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

Node v0.12 and io.js-v1.2 Support

The pre-built Ghost zips will now install and run on Node v0.12 and io.js-v1.2. Ghost may install on other versions of io.js if the sqlite3 binaries are available, but only v1.2 is officially tested.

If you are attempting to build Ghost from source rather than using the prebuilt zip files, you are more likely to run into install problems if you are using Node v0.12 or io.js. Ghost depends on node-sass, which only has binaries available for io.js v1.2. In the event that you do run into issues, please use our support forum to seek help.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.5.10 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.10 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.5.10.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, Paul Adam Davis, Felix Rieseberg, Fabian Becker and (last but not least) John O'Nolan.

Ghost 0.5.9 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. Ghost 0.5.9 is an incremental update to Ghost containing the new Navigation feature, several minor security fixes and many other improvements.

Ghost 0.5.9 is compatible with Node v0.10.x only, and does not add support for Node v0.12 or io.js, support for these is coming soon.

Highlights

• [New] Navigation builder
• [New] {{navigation}} helper
• [New] Image in RSS feed
• [Fixed] Incorrect user role shown on profile
• [Fixed] Re-authentication modal not accepting passwords
• [Fixed] Post published_by can be overridden via the API
• [Security] Users can edit objects they don't have permissions for via the API
• [Security] XSS vulnerability when deleting tags
• [Security] XSS vulnerability when using URLs for blog & user images

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

Security Fixes

Ghost 0.5.9 contains several minor fixes for security issues affecting authenticated users on multi-user blogs. This includes two potential XSS vulnerabilities in the admin UI and two privilege issues where the API allowed users to change data they should not be able to change. Thanks to Matteo Beccaro & Abdel Adim Oisif for discovering & responsibly reporting these issues.

Theme API Changes

Ghost 0.5.9 delivers the long awaited navigation interface. This allows users to specify a set of URLs and labels they wish to have displayed as a menu in their theme. This is output using a new {{navigation}} helper. Theme developers are encouraged to update their themes to use the new {{navigation}} feature.

The {{navigation}} helper works in much the same way as the {{pagination}} helper - it outputs a block of HTML which can be customised by specifying a navigation.hbs partial template in the partials folder of your theme. The default template can be found here.

See the theme API changelog, and particularly the navigation helper documentation for further information.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.5.9 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.9 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.5.9.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Jason Williams, Hannah Wolfe, Paul Adam Davis, Fabian Becker, Andrew Chilton, Matt Enlow, Marcos Ojeda, David Balderston, 1Pete, rmfx, Eugene Kulabuhov, Felix Rieseberg, Harry Hope, Ivan Votti, Jimmy Hsu, Josh Vanderwillik and Mark Stosberg.

Ghost 0.5.8 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.5.8 is an incremental update to Ghost containing several new features as well as numerous bug fixes.

Highlights

• [New] Tag Management UI
• [New] Labs options for WIP features
• [New] Importer handles images and markdown files
• [New] Socket permissions can be set from config
• [Fixed] Custom favicons not working correctly
• [Fixed] New posts added to bottom of list in admin
• [Fixed] Has helper tag matching bug
• [Fixed] Email sending issue when blog title has a comma
• [Fixed] Issues with fetching a Gravatar
• [Fixed] Various admin UI issues

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

In Detail

The first iteration of tag management which arrives in 0.5.8 is just part of the big picture vision for tags. This brings with it several updates to the API, and there are several more to come. We're making progress towards that all important v1.0 for the API.

Providing options for enabling work in progress features on the Labs page gives us a new way to ship features to users a little bit earlier than we usually would. This ties in with our faster releases to get more feedback from users as we build new stuff. It also gives us a safe place to try out features we aren't certain about shipping.

Updates to the importer in 0.5.8 provide a number of new opportunities for anyone building tools to migrate from other platforms to Ghost. The importer now takes a zip file which can contain either a Ghost JSON file or a set of markdown files, plus accompanying images. More information can be found in the import format guide.

Theme API Changes

There are no major theme API changes in Ghost 0.5.8, but there are a number of bug fixes and improvements to the existing set of helpers.

• The {{has}} helper was incorrectly matching partial tags.
• {{image}}, {{meta_title}} and {{meta_description}} have all been updated to use the properties which can be set in the tag management UI.
• {{excerpt}} helper now does a better job at handling footnotes
• {{url}} and {{image}} are no longer async meaning they'll work in conjunction with the {{encode}} helper.

See the theme API docs for more details.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.5.8 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.8 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.5.8.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Jason Williams, Hannah Wolfe, Paul Adam Davis, Robert Jackson, cobbspur, Felix Rieseberg, John O'Nolan, Eugene Kulabuhov, Jeremiah Hoyet, Delgermurun, Ilya Radchenko, Jason Friedrich, Daniel Tsui, Martin H. Normark, Matt Enlow and Mikael Brockman.

Ghost 0.5.7 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.5.7 is an incremental update to Ghost containing lots of bug fixes and small UI improvements.

Highlights

• [New] Login via editor modal if session expires
• [New] View post link in notification when publishing/updating a post
• [Fixed] Clearer user deletion warning
• [Fixed] Change password form allows for updating password of other user
• [Fixed] Sitemap handling of draft posts and images
• [Fixed] Invite user token verification failing

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

In Detail

Behind the scenes tag management is getting closer to being ready to ship, with just a few more pieces left to output the number of posts each tag has, and to add some user-facing & theme features. You can check the progress of the new UI by adding tagsUI:true to your config.js file.

Improvements to ember-simple-auth and subsequent work on Ghost means that we now have much better session handling. If a session ends whilst you're writing a post, Ghost will now prompt you to log in again.

Additionally we've made some changes to the Post API so that it returns the pre-calculated URL for a post. This allows us to more easily place links in the editor so that you can view a post and will also mean that 3rd party apps won't need to duplicate the code to figure out the URL from the permalink setting. In the future we may roll this to users and tags as well.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.5.7 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.7 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.5.7.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Jason Williams, Hannah Wolfe, cobbspur, Paul Adam Davis, Matt Enlow, Sebastian Gierlinger, Nazar Gargol, Paul Davis, Richard King, Vikhyat Korrapati, David Balderston, zethraeus, Felix Rieseberg, Ihab Khattab, Jacob Gable, Katie Fenn and Marco Otte-Witte.

Ghost 0.5.6 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.5.6 is an incremental improvement to Ghost, adding bug fixes and new features, including... Sitemaps!

Highlights

• [New] Sitemaps
• [New] Footnotes & Highlight
• [New] Labs page
• [Fixed] Posts failing to save after an error
• [Fixed] Password reset and invitation links not working with mailgun
• [Fixed] Image helper not working correctly with subdirectories
• [Fixed] RSS feed warning in Chrome

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

Labs Page & Hidden Features

The new labs page is intended as a way for us to showcase upcoming and experimental features to our users before they are officially ready for release. At the moment, it holds the import, export and other tools, which used to live at /ghost/debug/. These tools need an overhaul and will be worked on before finding a new home.

Soon we'll be adding options to this page so that users can enable in-development features which are normally only accessible via a config flag. For example, in 0.5.6 if you set tagsUI: true or codeInjectionUI: true in your config.js (just below url: a good spot) you'll be able to access the work-in-progress tag management and code injection features. The features are still being built, so use them at your own risk and if you do find any issues, please be sure to report them!

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.5.6 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.6 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site. If you've missed out a version or two, don't worry you can upgrade directly from any 0.5.x version straight to 0.5.6.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, Paul Adam Davis, Jason Williams, Felix Rieseberg, Nazar Gargol, Jacob Gable, cobbspur, John O'Nolan, Sebastian Gierlinger, Stefan Baumgartner, sanddudu, Harry V. Kiselev, Harry Wolff, Hugo Jobling, Jaiden Mispy, Matt Enlow, Paul Davis and Robert Jackson.

First, some exciting news. We now have shiny new IRC channel logs from the wonderful people at botbot.me: https://botbot.me/freenode/ghost/. These logs are pretty, searchable, and realtime!

Also news this week, I published our new Road to 0.6 guide here on the dev blog. I'm really stoked about this short term roadmap and the focus it gives us on shipping some really awesome new features to users, end users and developers. Here's a quick list of the top 10 features we are focusing on shipping:

1. Spell check
2. Code Injection
3. Sitemaps
4. Post Scheduling
5. Tag Management
6. Next/Prev links (the query helper)
7. Public API (OAuth)
8. Navigation menu
9. Custom Permalinks
10. Post Filtering

Progress

We've made great progress on several of these features. Spell check and Sitemaps both have pull requests which are almost ready to merge. Next/Prev links and Post filtering are both waiting for someone to pick up the issues (please come help!). Custom Permalinks and Tag management are both in progress, with tag management not being too far from shippable.

Custom Permalinks and Tag management are both multi-issue projects, each with an 'Epic' or parent issue and several sub issues. Many of these sub issues are quite small, and with tag management require re-implementation of behaviour which already exists on the post settings menu - meaning these issues would be good for new comers. If you'd like a hand getting involved, find me on IRC (#ghost on freenode) and let me know :)

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available in our IRC logs, which are now looked after by the lovely folks at botbot.me.

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 2nd December, 5:30pm London time.

Earlier this year we took the time to rewrite major parts of the codebase, which resulted in a big gap between releases. As a project, we need to make up for that by pushing to ship features and reach feature parity with other similar platforms. This guide aims to clarify the key features that are missing, their importance and current state as well as covering the infrastructure projects that we need to complete in order to ship future features.

The top 10 features we've gotta have...

1. Spell check
2. Code Injection
3. Sitemaps
4. Post Scheduling
5. Tag Management
6. Next/Prev links (the query helper)
7. Public API (OAuth)
8. Navigation menu
9. Custom Permalinks
10. Post Filtering

These are the top missing features, ordered by importance and determined by a mix of most requests / votes and the value of that feature vs its complexity. Varying technical complexity prevents us from shipping in exactly this order, however it is important to have clear priorities.

Each one of these items has at least one card on the public roadmap, which you can use to keep track of progress and find all of the related GitHub issues. Below is a quick run down of the state of each feature.

1. Spell check

This one has always been a bit of an embarrassment so we're super keen to ship it. It has been blocked on our use of CodeMirror in the editor, but recently we developed a plan to get it out the door. It's currently in testing and review, and is expected to ship very soon along with mobile uploads.

2. Code Injection

Code Injection provides users with a simple interface in the admin panel to paste code snippets into so they don't have to edit their theme to add things like Google Analytics. This feature is mostly ready, however it was important to test how it behaved with various code snippets and themes. As a result of testing, it seemed best to ship it with the ability to detect if, for example, the active theme has the {{ghost_head}} helper. Theme feature detection is tracked in issue #4319.

Moving forward, we should merge the PR with the feature behind a config flag and spec out a minimum shippable version of the theme feature detection concept.

3. Sitemaps

A small feature that's important for SEO and therefore key to being an awesome blogging platform. This feature is a WIP at present but is expected to land very soon.

4. Post Scheduling

It has become apparent that this feature is blocking bigger organisations from using Ghost. It will be technically challenging to solve in a way that suits the different kinds of environments that Ghost tends to run in. We're currently researching potential ways to solve it and speccing it out.

5. Tag Management

The interface for managing, editing and removing tags is going to provide for all kinds of interesting opportunities. It is currently partially implemented behind the config flag 'tagUI', and also requires several updates to the Tag and Post API to make all the features possible.

This is an ongoing WIP with quite a lot of scope, so we intend to focus on shipping a minimum version, as well as ensuring the full set of intended features is documented.

6. Next/Prev links (the query helper)

This is for including a link to the next or previous post at the bottom of a post. It depends on an API update (see issue #4262) and also the query helper.

The API work is planned and marked high priority but not yet in progress. The query helper is currently being discussed on GitHub and will be relatively straightforward to add once a decision is made on what it should look like.

7. Public API (OAuth)

Adding OAuth to the API so that external apps can access the API safely is receiving a lot of pressure from the community, therefore delivering this should add extra value by encouraging more contributions. It is currently blocked on a tree of dependencies stemming all the way back to permissions and database migrations.

First and foremost, we need to start unblocking progress. The first thing we need to solve is permissions migrations, which is currently a stalled issue. There are also several issues that could be worked on in parallel that will be highlighted in dev meetings.

8. Navigation menu

Similar to code injection, allowing users to build a simple navigation menu will help reduce the need to edit themes. The idea is to provide a simple UI to set the title and URL, add a new item and reorder items. The interface is currently being designed.

9. Custom Permalinks

Ghost has supported all manner of different permalink formats for some time, but only by editing the setting directly in the DB. The UI for this has been designed and fleshed out in HTML/CSS, so it's ready to wire up in Ember. There is also some functional work needed to ensure all the permutations work 100% and are well-tested.

10. Post Filtering

For users with a lot of posts, the content screen doesn't currently cut the mustard. Adding a menu to allow users to filter this is a step in the right direction, but is intended as an intermediary step whilst we work on adding full search capabilities. Work on this has stalled and needs picking up again.

Infrastructure Projects

1. Permissions Migration
2. File System Abstraction
3. Image Processing
4. DB Migration Improvements

Each of these projects will help us to build out major features for Ghost. As they are not user-facing, they don't live on the roadmap, and instead have an issue on GitHub. Below is a quick description of each item.

1. Permissions Migration

Issue #3910

Currently we have a set of permissions fixtures which are loaded into the DB when Ghost is started. These have undergone one wholesale change in the past, so we were able to simply remove the old permissions and create new ones. Now we need to create a simple way to add new permissions for additional endpoints.

Presently, there's no clear plan for what this will look like. We need to research similar existing systems in order to get some inspiration and kickstart the improvement works.

2. File System Abstraction

Issue #2852

Assuming that it's ok to use fs, and that all the images, themes and other bits and pieces will be in the local file system is a bad thing. It makes it hard to use Ghost with a cdn and also has implications for hosts with a transient file system like Heroku.

This work is partly done, we have a storage abstraction for images, but it's not used for everything which it ought to be. We also need to make it pluggable in a simple way so that devs can provide a different storage layer with a simple config change. In order to move forward, the issue will be re-written and split up into smaller tasks.

3. Image Processing

Issue #4453

Adding Imagemagick as a dependency is too complicated, so we need a pure JS way to do resizing, cropping and removing of exif data for images uploaded to Ghost. At present the problem is being researched and discussed on GitHub, with a view to adding image optimisation as a first step.

4. DB Migration Improvements

Issue #4479

So far we're able to add, remove, rename and drop unique constraints on columns in Ghost. In order to make some improvements and build more features we also need to be able to change column types / sizes and we need to make the whole process tonnes easier. Updating the database currently includes a manual process of ensuring we can still import and export, and this complexity needs removing.

The future

There are obviously numerous other features and projects that we need to deliver, like search, i18n, post revisions and diffs, the app platform and tonnes more. After 0.6 the likely focus will be on building one or two bigger features with far-reaching implications like search & i18n. A 'Road to 0.7' issue will appear closer to the time.

Today's meeting was largely interrupted by issues with the release of Ghost 0.5.4. Unfortunately I wasn't able to give it my full attention, but here's a quick overview of what we discussed:

Releasing Ghost 0.5.4 and 0.5.5

This week there was a big push to clean up more bugs and issues and release Ghost 0.5.4 as we wanted to get the memory leak fix out in the wild. Ghost 0.5.4 was released yesterday (18th Nov), but we quickly discovered there was a charset issue affecting MySQL blogs. As a result we took Ghost 0.5.4 down temporarily whilst we located the problem.

Further investigation has turned up a serious configuration issue between knex, the library we use to create SQL queries, and the node-mysql mysql driver module. To resolve this short term we have reverted node-mysql back to an earlier version and released Ghost 0.5.5. Long term we will need a more in-depth fix and there will be further details of this in due course.

Focus for 0.6

During the meeting I shared the 'Road to 0.6' write-up that is going to be published here on the blog shortly. This was digested and discussed by those present, and it was agreed that this helps to provide more focus and clarity around priority features that we want to ship to our users. We also believe our users will be happy to hear that so many big features, like post scheduling, are priority issues and will be shipping in the near future.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 25th November, 5:30pm London time.

Ghost 0.5.5 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org.

Ghost 0.5.5 is a minor update to 0.5.4 which resolves an issue with character encoding for MySQL databases. If you're using MySQL and have upgraded to 0.5.4, please upgrade to 0.5.5. The extra fix can be found here.

Below is the original post about Ghost 0.5.4:

0.5.4 is a maintenance release featuring a very important fix for a memory leak affecting 0.5.3, which causes Ghost to become unstable and crash under heavy load. This update also includes a number of more minor improvements and bug fixes.

Due to the memory leak that has been fixed, this is a recommended upgrade.

Highlights

[New] Postgres is now officially supported
[New] Cmd/Ctrl + s now works on settings page
[Fixed] Memory leak causing instability under load
[Fixed] Autosave triggering 'do you want to leave' alert incorrectly
[Fixed] Issues with uppercase emails
[Fixed] Subdirectory output twice in image URLs
[Fixed] Incorrect twitter card data

As well as many other improvements. You can see the full change log for the full details of every change included in this release.

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Jason Williams, Paul Adam Davis, Hannah Wolfe, Matt Enlow, Felix Rieseberg, cobbspur, David Balderston, Robert Jackson, Jilles Soeters, Leonard Camacho, Jacob Gable, Mattias Cibien, Nazar Gargol, Harry Mills, surgesoft, Victor Szeto, Yury Michurin, David Robson, meowtec and John O'Nolan.

Update: 0.5.4 has an issue which effects MySQL blogs only, and causes character encoding issues. If you're using MySQL, please upgrade straight to Ghost 0.5.5.

Ghost 0.5.4 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.5.4 is a maintenance release featuring a very important fix for a memory leak affecting 0.5.3, which causes Ghost to become unstable and crash under heavy load. This update also includes a number of more minor improvements and bug fixes.

Due to the memory leak that has been fixed, this is a recommended upgrade.

Highlights

[New] Postgres is now officially supported
[New] Cmd/Ctrl + s now works on settings page
[Fixed] Memory leak causing instability under load
[Fixed] Autosave triggering 'do you want to leave' alert incorrectly
[Fixed] Issues with uppercase emails
[Fixed] Subdirectory output twice in image URLs
[Fixed] Incorrect twitter card data

As well as many other improvements. You can see the full change log for the full details of every change included in this release.

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Jason Williams, Paul Adam Davis, Hannah Wolfe, Matt Enlow, Felix Rieseberg, cobbspur, David Balderston, Robert Jackson, Jilles Soeters, Leonard Camacho, Jacob Gable, Mattias Cibien, Nazar Gargol, Harry Mills, surgesoft, Victor Szeto, Yury Michurin, David Robson, meowtec and John O'Nolan.

This week I was away at Full Frontal speaking about managing open source projects. As a result I've got a lot of inspiration on how to improve our processes and be more open, but I'm also looking for feedback from our community members via issue #4396 - a discussion on improving our development process. Please get involved!

Progress towards 0.6

Since the release of 0.5, we've been working on releasing user-facing features to try to reach more of a feature parity with other publishing systems. We've been steadily releasing every time we have a few more feaures to offer, but what hasn't been clear is what the full set of features we want to have before we call Ghost 0.6 is, and what happens after that.

To try to resolve this, we're going to have a 'Road to 0.6' writeup either as an issue or on the wiki. This will detail both the features we need to build and the underlying infrastructure projects we need to do to build them well, and be ready for the next set of features. During the meeting we discussed which features those present felt were most obviously missing.

Some of the candidates include: tag management, previous and next post links, post filtering, shareable preview, a navigation builder tool and a query helper to give theme developers access to the API.

This will all be written up and shared on the dev blog when it's ready, so watch this space :)

Memory Leak and Maintenance Release

There have been several reports in the last week or two of a memory leak in Ghost 0.5.3. That memory leak has been confirmed as existing in 0.5.3 only, found, and fixed (big thanks to @jaswilli). There's one more small bug we'd like to fix before cutting a maintenance release: #4400 - autosave is causing some people to get 'Do you want to leave' nag warnings at the wrong times. 0.5.4 will likely land this week with several bug fixes and improvements.

Update: the memory leak fix is a single file patch, if you need it you can find it here. The fix will be released in 0.5.4 on Monday 17th.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 18th November, 5:30pm London time.

The last two weeks have seen us steadily progress through the main issues in the current backlog, tackle bug fixes and test improvements and also hack away at bits of some bigger features like tag management and custom permalinks. There are still a few high priority bugs in the Current backlog that I'd really like to see go in before cutting a release, but otherwise I'm aiming to do a release in the next week or so.

I am hoping to drop a major feature in, like sitemaps if possible, but there are a number of quite important bug fixes that warrant a release of their own if nothing lands in time.

The majority of the meeting today was spent discussing the state of our development processes. We've made quite a few changes to remove the long term planning (which just caused disappointment), get more agile, and ship more features more often. It's been an interesting and largely successful process, so I wanted to pause to reflect on the changes see how we might improve them further.

Specifically I'm interested in how to make it clearer what the development priorities are (and why) and also to encourage more new contributors to get involved with developing Ghost. Questions like this always require a bit of reflection, so to get a bit more of a conversation going, I've raised a GitHub issue. Please drop by and let us know what your experiences of our process have been like :)

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 11th November, 5:30pm London time.

The CSS community is a wonderful thing to be part of. Everyone from GitHub to Lonely Planet has shared how they write CSS. Every time I read one of these posts, I learn something new; something I can use in my own day-to-day work.

The current state of CSS at Ghost is one of flux. We have rewritten Ghost's CSS a couple times to make it leaner and easier to learn. But there's more to the health of a code-base than it's quality. Comments and learnability are absolutely crucial to helping new contributors get involved and help Ghost grow more and more.

This post is a primer on how we do CSS at Ghost, and how parts will be done going forward. So, with all that said, let's dive in!

Contents

• Introduction
• Pre-Processor
• Folder Architecture
• Naming Things
• Media Queries
• Comments
• Linting
• Documentation

Introduction

As a rule, our CSS is purposefully kept as lean & clean as possible. We don't prefix properties, we don't nest deeply, and we don't use any pre-packaged libraries – if you exclude Normalize.

A quick note on browser support. We aim to target the last 2 versions of popular browsers. At the time of writing, that means IE 10 & IE 11. Other target browsers automatically update which makes them a non-issue.

Pre-Processor

We use Sass as our pre-processor. It is the most popular pre-processor around today and has the widest network of support and collective knowledge. We use Libsass via a node-sass Grunt task.

We use Libsass instead of Ruby-Sass, principally so we don't have a Ruby dependency. It's also much faster, taking an average of 3 seconds to generate 2 minified files and 2 source maps. One set for Ghost, the other for docs.

Prefixing is handled by Autoprefixer which is configured to only prefix the browsers we want to support. This means the only prefixed properties in the code are very specific to a particular browser; namely -webkit- stuff for a majority of mobile browsers.

Folder Architecture

The file structure we've adopted is simple but suits the reusability of various components very well.

core/client/assets/sass
|-- screen.scss
|-- vendor/
|-- modules/
|-- patterns/
|-- components/
|-- layouts/

• screen.scss is where everything is @include'd, including Normalize from Bower
• vendor/ is for CSS related to some JavaScript libraries
• modules/ is for mixins, variables and utilities (such as icons)
• patterns/ is for global styles, buttons, and forms
• components/ is for groups of patterns with small bits of layout
• layouts/ is where page layouts go and any page-specific changes to patterns and components

File Layout

Files have a strict layout, at least in terms of the way comments are written, blank lines added, and nesting is handled.

To help illustrate how, here's a full example showing every guideline and below is a list explaining each.

Note: This is not a real example, or well-crafted code. It's a guide to how code should be laid out and architected.

// ------------------------------------------------------------
// The Sass Example
//
// This is a brief example of how to structure a `.scss` file.
//
// * Define animations
// * Classed to use these animations
// ------------------------------------------------------------


//
// A wrapper for Element, extending %other-wrapper
// --------------------------------------------------

.element-wrapper {
    @extend &other-wrapper;

    padding: 15px 20px;
    border: 1px solid $lightbrown;

    @media (min-width: 801px) {
        margin: 10px;
        border-color: $midbrown;
    }

    // Variations
    &.darker {
        border-color: $midbrown;

        &.variation {
            padding-left: 10px;
            padding-right: 10px;
        }
    }

    .element-edit {
        border: 1px solid $lightbrown;
        border-radius: $rounded;

        @include icon($i-edit, 2rem, $lightbrown){
            transition: color linear 0.15s;
        };

        &:hover {
            border-color: $midbrown;

            &:before {
                color: $midbrown;
            }
        }
    }

}//.wide

//
// Another element
// --------------------------------------------------

.another-element {
    font-size: 1.6rem;
    line-height: 1.325;
    color: $darkgrey;
}

• Every file has a title, and a slug it the file is specific to one place
• Never style ID's and .js- classes
• Use short-hand notation where possible
• Blocks longer than 25 lines get a closing comment
• Keep nesting to a minimum, and no deeper than 3 levels, including pseudo selectors (:nth-of-type and :after)
• Group related properties together
• Media queries always go after properties, in order of small to large width/height values
• Don't be clever with selectors. Aim for readability over complexity

Naming Things

Variables

We've (rather unconventionally) decided not to use abstract variable names. As an example, we have $red instead of $error. It's much easier to understand and significantly lowers the barrier to entry.

Classes

We favour longer classes names and more of them over nesting selectors. So instead of a selector like .navigation ul li a, we would use a .navigation-link.

Files

If you stick to the rules explained in the folder architecture, the name for a new file should become fairly obvious. The name of the file should directly relate to its contents. If you find a single file has 2 very separate chunks of code in it, they should probably be abstract out into separate files.

Media Queries

In very rare cases we detect the type of device (desktop or touch device), but everything else is based on viewport width and sometimes feature availability. As such, there's plenty of media queries dotted around the code.

So far, we've chosen not to use variables in media queries in lieu of more readability. However - thinking forward - there are several places that would benefit from having a variable in the MQ.

Comments

Code Tells You How, Comments Tell You Why
Jeff Atwood - Coding Horror

There will be times when the code has to be complex, be it the necessary implementation, sheer complexity of properties, or inherited values.

If any CSS you write is not immediately obvious in context, it should be commented - not explaining how it works, but why its there in the first place.

.sample-component {
    @extend .other-component;

    transform: translate(0,0,0); // Resets `translate` inherited from `.other-component`
}

Linting

Currently, Ghost's Sass is not linted. That has to change. Linting the JavaScript of Ghost has helped keep the quality high before it even gets committed to the code base. Doing the same with CSS will ensure the code is consistent throughout.

Things that should be linted, include:

• Levels of nesting & indentation
• Flag uses of ID selectors and classes beginning with .js-
• Spacing after selectors, properties, and values
• Use of single & double quotes
• Formatting and order of properties
• Selector formatting, preferring all lowercase with hyphens
• Null values with a unit (e.g. 0px should be 0 or none)
• Use of colour names, preferring $red over red
• Duplicate properties
• Duplicate selectors on the same level

At the time of writing, there are no libraries that will lint .scss files that dont require a Ruby dependency, but this should serve as a list of requirements for tools that crop up in the mean time.

Documentation

We do have some documentation, but it's far from ideal. It's currently a Jekyll site deep in the folder structure core/client/docs. Right now, it houses examples of reusable components, or patterns in our terms.

I'm not convinced that having it auto-regenerate is the greatest of ideas, but it certainly needs some love.

You Can Help

We think (once all this is implemented), Ghost's CSS will be really easy to work on. However, there is always room to improve. If you want to help out or make the CSS even better, there's plenty of ways to talk to the awesome contributors.

As of today, Ghost automatically generates rich meta tags to allow your content to look fantastic when embedded within social networks.

We've added meta tag output for Schema.org, Twitter Cards, and Open Graph. This means that any of your posts shared on Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter or Google+ will now have rich content associated with them, allowing them to show up as beautiful embedded stories.

Making your content look great on these networks generally leads to much higher engagement from readers, with more shares and mentions. It can frequently also lead to more people linking to your blog, which is (of course) very good for SEO purposes.

Ghost(Pro) users can start using this feature immediately. Users running Ghost on their own servers can grab this feature by upgrading to Ghost 0.5.3.

Unfortunately, I'm not able to do the public meeting this week. Apologies for the very late notice - the clock change in Europe over the weekend means the meeting will now clash with my flight home, which I wasn't aware of last week.

Instead, here's a little update / progress report for the week:

This week has been a productive one: we've seen some great pull requests with nice bug fixes and contributions towards new features get merged. Our new current backlog is currently sitting at 8 open, 3 closed issues, with 3 work in progress pull requests meaning we're making really nice progress towards having enough new features to warrant another release.

Help Wanted:

There are still two issues in the current backlog which are looking for someone to work on them. These are both API issues, one to add previous and next to the post API and the other is to finish the Tags API so that we can complete tag management. So if you're a developer with some spare time at the weekend - why not give us a hand?

Ghost as express middleware

There is currently a lot of interest in finishing up the work to make Ghost usable as express middleware. If you're interested, check out PR 4101 and join the discussion!

Next week

Next week's meeting will be on as per usual: Tuesday 4th November, 5:30pm London time.

Today we're introducing auto-save for Ghost. From now on your posts will always be automatically saved in the background while you're writing.

Saving occurs in 60 second intervals, or whenever you stop writing - whichever comes first. You won't notice anything happening, magic poltergeists take care of everything behind the scenes.

Ghost(Pro) users can start using this feature immediately. Users running Ghost on their own servers can grab this feature by upgrading to Ghost 0.5.3.

That can’t be right… - I muttered.

+1,000% conversion

How could that possibly be right? A 4-digit increase?

I checked and re-checked the data; but there were no mistakes. Having read countless books and blog posts, I’d heard about the paradigm from other startup case-studies. This was the first time I was seeing it in person.

A unicorn!

What We’ve Learned from Onboarding Our Ghost Users

It all started with a very basic premise: Some of our users have a better initial experience than others and - as a result - they are more likely to convert into paying Ghost(Pro) subscribers.

The question was, how to quantify which parts of the experience were contributing to (or detracting from) the eventual outcome.

I enjoy reading case studies about how other companies give their users a good first impression. The general advice is always the same: You have to get users to the “aha!” moment. The point at which they start to get value from the product. For an accounting app, that might be when the user creates and sends their first invoice.

And you see - that’s the problem with most software books and blogs. They always make the same vague statement and give the same tired example about an accounting app and an invoice. What seems to be lacking, so often, is information on how to apply these lessons to what you’re doing.

The catastrophic assumption here is thinking you actually know what your software’s “aha!” moment even is. Or, perhaps even more fatally, that you think that there’s only 1 of them.

In reality, there are lots of little “aha!” moments throughout the onboarding experience - and one of the most important things you can do is learn what they are.

The 3 Key Moments which Matter

Had you asked me what the “Aha!” moment for a blogging platform would be a few months ago, I would’ve said “publishing a post”. That’s when you’ve set everything up, used the product, and completed your first piece of work.

After a couple of months of tracking various user actions, publishing a post did turn out to have some impact - but it was actually the lowest of all, compared to the other things we found.

Using events which are recorded in real-time on Ghost.org I was able to start comparing events and looking for correlation and causation. Do users who signed up today convert better than users who signed up a month ago? Are you more likely to subscribe for a Pro account if you’ve been contacted by our support team? Do people who publish more posts get more value? These were some of the questions we wanted to answer.

I looked at the baseline data from users starting a 14 day trial on Ghost(Pro), to signing up for a paid account. Next, I tested adding steps in between those two points, and re-evaluated the conversion data based on behaviour.

That’s roughly the moment at which I stopped in my tracks as the funnel in front of me showed a conversion increase of more than 1,000% for one particular group.

I wasn’t expecting such a massive result from this comparison.

Users who added a custom theme to their blog converted at just over 10% - more than 10x the rate of users who simply stayed with the default theme.

Very clearly, our users were experiencing a significant “Aha!” moment as they personalised Ghost and turned it into their own, custom space on the internet.

There were 3 events which affected the eventual subscription conversion rate most significantly:

• Publishing a first post: 5% conversion
• Uploading a custom theme: 10% conversion
• Adding a custom domain: 8% conversion

Users who had not completed any of the above events converted at a vastly unimpressive 0.9%.

This is about as disparate as you will ever see a set of statistics for user onboarding, so we knew that we had a lot of work to do in order to make this better.

Creating a More Successful Onboarding Experience

Armed with this new data, we set out to create a better onboarding experience, focusing on improving the areas were we could see clear correlation in success rates.

The important thing to understand about user onboarding is that each step contains a bucket of users. Once you figure out what the buckets are, you can focus on improving each one individually and it will cascade down to the others.

We knew we had events which were affecting conversion the most. So how could we get more people to complete those events?

Taking a little gamification inspiration partially from LinkedIn but mainly from Intercom.io - we set out to create a “blog setup” progress meter. This would be a simple 5 step process to guide the user through the most important tasks to complete, including the ones which we knew would make them more likely to get value out of Ghost. Each step has a simple text or video user tutorial on how to complete it, and each step takes you closer to 100% on the red progress meter - which sticks in your Ghost.org navbar until you get there.

The only flaw with this process is that it relies on the user being present on the site for them to know what the next step is. What happens if the user sets up a blog and then closes the window because they have to go out - forgetting to come back and do the next thing?

To tackle this problem, we used Intercom.io to send conditional emails depending on where in the chain you are.

This is set up to try to be as helpful as possible without being annoying.

If a user has published their first post but we haven’t seen them in a couple of days, we send a 90 second instructional video on how to install a theme. If they’ve already done that step, we send instructions on how to set up a custom domain. Most importantly, we only ever send these emails if they haven’t been contacted in the last few days and if they haven’t opted out of any previous emails.

The results have been incredible to watch. While on average just 7% of users who start a trial will add a custom theme or domain name, that number jumps to 26% if they watch one of our tutorial videos and go through the onboarding progress steps.

Quadruple the users entering this point of the conversion funnel, means a trickle-down effect as users with custom themes continue to convert better at the end of the funnel.

By helping users have a better initial experience, we’re able to show them why this is something worth their time and energy. This, in turn, leads to a greater positive emotional investment when it comes time to decide whether Ghost(Pro) is worth paying for.

From observing this in action and actively talking to our customers, we understand that customising the look and feel of Ghost is a major part of its appeal. The degree of control and independence which Ghost gives here is something that closed platforms simply aren’t able to match.

Where We Go From Here

Any good experiment generally leaves you with just as many questions as answers, and this one is no exception. From the lessons we’ve learned in figuring out what affects users most as they get familiar with Ghost for the first time - we now have many more things to test and think about:

• How can we make discovering new themes easier?
• How can we make installing and customising themes easier?
• Can we reduce the steps needed to add a custom domain?
• Is there a correlation between the number of posts a user publishes, and the average length of their subscription?
• What events lead to an increase in publication frequency?
• What events correlate with abandonment of the setup process?
• What other moments are there that we are not yet measuring?

Perhaps the most significant piece of data that came to light throughout this process had nothing to with conversion to a Ghost(Pro). I was interested to see if these “Aha!” moments were purely a good onboarding experience, or if - in fact - they had a longer term effect on how much value people were getting from the software in general.

The data, once again, was fascinating: Users with the default theme published an average of 2 posts per month, while users who had customised Ghost with their own design published an average of 4.4 posts per month. Usage more than doubled.

We don’t know the order of causation at this point. Does having a custom theme make you publish more posts? Or does publishing more posts make you want a custom theme? But we can say with relative certainty that the two are clearly correlated. People who are getting value from Ghost have a custom theme, and people who have a custom theme are getting value from Ghost.

This is important.

By understanding the impact of features on usage, we can filter this data back into the design and production of Ghost itself. We can create a tool which isn’t just satisfactory in its utility - but rather one which generates a real sense of pride and attachment to that which it is used to create. And that’s what we want to do; we want to make a tool which writers love to use.

While cookie-cutter advice about “aha!” moments is interesting - it doesn’t really mean anything until you apply it to your own users. Until you figure out what things are happening, what moments are taking place and which are significant.

Figure that out and - I believe - there’s no limit to the amount you can learn. We still have a long way to go, but we're enjoying the journey immensely.

Update: 13 Apr 2015

We spent 30 minutes on a single change to our onboarding after this which increased revenue by $60,000 a year. Check it out: The 30 Minute Change That Made 25% More People Try Ghost: Telling Them what To Click

This week we have successfully shipped Ghost 0.5.3, whoop! Please see the release blog post for more details on that.

In the meeting we introduced a minor update to our workflow, where we now have 3 milestones on GitHub, which roughly corrolate to the public roadmap:

• Current Backlog - which contains ~10 high priority items that are currently being worked towards or are very much wanted for the next release
• Next Backlog - other lower priority issues which are ready to be worked on and free to pickup
• Future Backlog - issues which aren't ready to be worked on yet.

We placed 9 items into the Current Backlog for now - we want to keep it around ~10 and as features are completed, we'll add in bugs or amendments. This effectively acts like a monthly sprint with the aim being to release new features and refill the backlog every 4 weeks or so.

There are 2 items in the Current Backlog, #4262 and #4263 which need a champion to work on them. They are both updates to the API needed to ship important features. We'd love to see a new contributor come along and give us a hand with these!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 28th October, 5:30pm London time.

Ghost 0.5.3 is now available on GitHub, npm and Ghost.org. 0.5.3 is an incremental improvement to Ghost, adding bug fixes and new features, including... Auto Save!

Highlights

[New] Post Auto Save
[New] Structured data (open graph, twitter cards)
[New] GMail-style shortcuts
[Fixed] Themes not working correctly with symlinks
[Fixed] User screen limited to 20 users
[Fixed] Next & prev meta links don't get HTTPS
[Fixed] Numerous UI bugs

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

In Detail

Power users will enjoy our new GMail style shortcuts. See the new shortcut guide on support.ghost.org for full details of all the keyboard shortcuts supported in the Ghost admin.

Configuration changes

The new privacy settings have been updated to add a new useStructuredData flag which enables blog owners to disable the new structured data feature.

Theme API changes

Ghost 0.5.3 includes the following additions and changes to the Theme API:

[New] Themes now work correctly when symlinked
[Changed] {{ghost_head}} outputs structured data for posts

For full details of what has changed and details on how to use the new features, please see the theme change log.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.5.3 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.3 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Paul Adam Davis, Hannah Wolfe, Jason Williams, Matt Enlow, Fabian Becker, John O'Nolan, cobbspur, Gabor Javorszky, Felix Rieseberg, surgesoft, Ian Mitchell, Jilles Soeters, Mattias Cibien, NetPuter, Sebastian Gierlinger and Connor Tumbleson.

We've now fixed and merged the majority of the UI issues that have been niggling us since releasing 0.5.2. We have just a couple of issue marked as blockers, and hope to get those resolved in the next couple of days so that we can cut the next release.

There are currently open PRs which add autosave and the majority of the work for adding structured data (open graph, twitter and other meta data) is also done, so we hope to wrap these up and get them into the release.

During the meeting we also discussed pushing forward the new tag management interface, as well as starting to plan adding post revisions. Adding post revisions is largely an exercise in database design, but also I hope we'll be able to simplify the current process for creating new data versions in Ghost (i.e. adding data migrations) by simplifying the importer and exporter.

One last note from the meeting - our tests are experiencing regular but random failures (again) which is really quite frustrating when we're trying to build out new features. Therefore there are major kudos (and potential doughnuts) for whoever submits a fix for #4277 Travis timeouts during integration tests!!!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 October, 5:30pm London time.

It's been a quiet week at Ghost, so it's going to be a very quick meeting writeup.

This week my focus has been on relaunching the developer docs using readme.io. I'll publish a further update about this and what the future for it looks like, but in the meantime you can check them out over on http://docs.ghost.org.

We spent much of the meeting discussing how to approach a couple of issues that aren't 100% clear. There's still quite a lot of churn going on as UI bugs get fixed, one of the biggest of these being that the users page in settings is only listing 20 users as the infinite scroll has broken. Getting these sorts of things fixed is a priority, so we can push out updates to our users.

We also discussed how to request and receive the next and previous post in the chronological post list, via the post API. It's quite a common feature to display a link to the next post at the bottom of the current post, and our API doesn't yet support doing this. There are a number of additions and amendments like this that we want to make to the API as well as getting oAuth fully rolled out so that 3rd party clients are able to authenticate and work with the API.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 14th October, 5:30pm London time.

Today we're officially announcing support for custom post meta data! You can now add a custom meta title and description to all your posts and pages within Ghost. This allows for more fine-grained control over your search engine content targeting.

For anyone using the default theme, this will work straight away. If you're using a custom theme, this content will be inserted via the {{meta_title}} and {{meta_description}} helpers.

Developers can find out more about how to use images and more recently released features in the Theme API Changelog.

Have fun improving your rankings across the board!

Users running Ghost on their own servers can grab this feature by upgrading to Ghost 0.5.2.

Ghost 0.5.2 is out! We managed to turn it around in 6 weeks, which for us is pretty speedy, as well as cram in a heap of code base improvements along with the shiny new design and awesome new features. As always, I want to thank all the people who worked hard on making 0.5.2 happen :)

This week's meeting ended up being pretty long, as we reviewed the issues that we're looking to get closed in the near future as well as the long list of open PRs. During the meeting we also reviewed the public roadmap and renamed the columns to try to make it clearer that it reflects the progress of the project as opposed to being a clear plan of what will happen and when. As an open source project depending on contributions from volunteers it makes far more sense to focus on making it clear to developers what is ready to work on, and showing our users what features they're likely to see next.

What's next?

At the moment, there are quite a few open or PR'd UI issues as an (expected) result of the design refresh. Therefore the next time we cut master as a release, it's likely to be mostly full of UI bug fixes.

As well as the features on the roadmap, there are a number of high priority internal issues that need people working on them. In order to ship new features, we need to implement #3910 permissions migrations - specifically so that we can add new permissions for new parts of the API. There are also a number of missing column migrations that are needed in order to properly look at #4134 reviewing max lengths in the database schema.

We have had a couple of recent PRs looking to add new storage methods to Ghost, but the issue
#2852 More Filestorage Abstraction doesn't seem to get much love despite being a prerequisite to making this work. Additionally we have had quite a lot of interest in #827 Proposal: expose Ghost as reusable express middleware, but the discussion on how this should work never quite reaches conclusion - despite us being 90% of the way there. If these issues are interesting to you, come get involved!

I'm also looking to push forward on updating the admin functional tests with #3350 Create functional tests for MU as we've seen a couple of regressions in the UI which could have been prevented with testing. If you're looking to get started with contributing to Ghost, submitting PRs to improve the tests is often a great first step - and a guaranteed merge ;)

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 7th October, 5:30pm London time.

Today we are announcing a new set of plans and pricing for our Ghost(Pro) service. I'd like to share some details of how and why we're doing this. Tl:dr; We're increasing plan prices and increasing the resources in each plan. It's a better model for us and more value for money for you. Also: No more penalities for traffic spikes.

How We Started Charging

When we launched Ghost(Pro) at the beginning of 2014, we took a giant leap into the unknown. With Ghost (and even Node.js) being so young, creating a hosted infrastructure to support thousands of instances of Ghost was a big challenge. In short: we actually had no idea how many instances of Ghost we could even fit on a server, because no one had ever done it before. This made working out the cost of hosting a Ghost blog relatively difficult.

The second biggest factor in our initial pricing was the fact that when we launched, Ghost was at version 0.3. It was a newborn baby with 3 features and a whole lot of ambition. There simply wasn't that much you could do with it, yet, so the initial value in subscribing to Ghost(Pro) was relatively low.

With those things in mind, we set our prices at a low barrier to entry, and with relatively conservative plan limits while we started benchmarking our infrastructure and working our tails off to build more features into Ghost itself.

What We've Learned Since Then

For a first attempt, we did quite a good job of positioning our pricing as an entry-level product. That being said, we quickly learned a great deal about where we were going wrong and what we could (and should) be doing better.

Lesson 1: We didn't ask for enough on price.

An entry level price point of $5 is a really good rate for a VPS hosting plan. But we're not offering a VPS! Ghost(Pro) is a fully managed service with automated installs, upgrades, backups, performance optimisations, and a content delivery network serving your blog from 27 different data centres around the world. This costs more time and money to run, and it also provides a lot more value in the time and money it saves users.

We're a not-for-profit organisation, so we can't take any venture capital or investment. Ghost(Pro) is what keeps the lights on the for entire Ghost project. While our current pricing has allowed us to create something sustainable, we need more revenue to grow our infrastructure and our team so we can compete with all the (very well funded) closed platforms out there.

Lesson 2: We didn't give enough on value.

The other big thing we learned was which things our users care about most. Initially we set quite high limits on number of blogs per plan, but we found most people didn't use more than 1. We also set quite low limits on views per plan, and we found that people were very nervous about having to try and keep their traffic within plan limits - which is something that's (of course) totally unpredictable.

The value that you get from a Ghost(Pro) blog is when you publish something and it manages to reach a large audience of people. That's what our users care about, and we didn't do a good job of aligning the value of plans with this. You shouldn't be penalised for publishing great content and getting a traffic spike.

What We're Doing Now

For the last few weeks, we've been rolling out new pricing for new customers. Effective today, our old plans will subsequently be discontinued for new users.

There are three main changes in our new plans:

1. Plan Prices Have Gone Up

Our entry level Ghost(Pro) plan is now $10, and we have new larger plans for users with a consistently high level of traffic. Increasing our minimum service level allows us to run a much more healthy business, and continue to hire great developers to work on Ghost and make it better for the entire world.

The Ghost software itself remains (and always will be) completely free of charge.

2. View Allocations Have Gone Up

We've more than doubled the view allowance in every plan. This means that relative to usage, prices have effectively gone down. Many customers will be able to downgrade plans and receive the same number of views. Bandwidth, storage, and all other things you would pay for on a traditional host remain unlimited.

3. No Suspensions When You Exceed Plan Limits

Previously if you went over your view count in a month, you would be asked to upgrade your plan or your blog would be suspended. Effective today, we are completely stopping this process. All Ghost(Pro) users will now be allowed to exceed plan view limits by any amount without penalty. If you hit the front page of Hacker News, your blog will stay online and we'll keep on serving it to all your readers.

If we notice that you've exceeded your plan limits for 3 consecutive months, we will send you an email to ask you to move to a higher plan. In short: All customers will now pay for usage based on their average traffic, and never be forced into a higher plan because they had a traffic spike in one particular month.

Q&A

How are existing users affected?

No changes. We will honour existing plans for all of our early users who made starting Ghost(Pro) possible. If you want to change over to our new plans, you'll actually get a lower price based on usage. Many users can now also downgrade to a cheaper plan with the same number of views, if they choose. But we'll leave that decision up to you.

If you do want to make the switch, just head over to your acount billing area.

Why these numbers?

We spent a long time crunching digits and analysing every possible similar service which people pay for. We sent out a survey to thousands of our existing users to ask the how they felt about our prices. The general consensus was that we were underpricing, and we could offer more value per plan.

Who can I talk to about this to learn more?

As always, you can reach us any time (day or night) on support@ghost.org. We'd love to hear your feedback, and help you with anything you might need.

It's been an incredible journey so far creating a service which people genuinely love, and we're only at the very beginning. We are proving a brand new, sustainable, open source business model to the world, and it's you – our users – who are making it possible.

Starting today, you can now add cover images to all of your posts. Open your post settings menu, drag and drop an image in, and you're all set!

For anyone who is using the default theme, this will work right away. If you're using a custom theme, you can output post cover images inside post.hbs using the new {{image}} helper. Easy :)

Developers can find out more about how to use images and more recently released features in the Theme API Changelog.

We're looking forward to seeing even more beautiful posts!

Users running Ghost on their own servers can grab this feature by upgrading to Ghost 0.5.2.

Ghost 0.5.2 contains several new features as well as a refresh of the admin design, important bug fixes, updates to the theme API, JSON API and importantly breaking changes to the way Ghost is started if you use it as an npm module.

Highlights

[New] Admin design refresh
[New] About Ghost page
[New] Post settings menu
[New] Meta data screen in post settings menu
[New] Post cover image option in post settings menu
[New] Privacy config flags
[New] Direct mail sends mail without config
[Improved] Error handling when starting Ghost
[Fixed] Request entity too large error
[Fixed] 'Post NOT saved' dialog keeps appearing on Safari
[Fixed] Author dropdown only shows 15 authors
[Fixed] Switching between blog and admin can cause blog to lose styling
[Fixed] UpdateCheck can prevent login
[Fixed] Login conflicts with multiple Ghost installs

Breaking Changes

[Changed] Ghost no longer starts automatically when used as an npm module
[Changed] Keyboard shortcut for headings is now Ctrl/⌘ + H

In Detail

Configuration changes

Ghost now supports direct mail. This means you no longer have to specify mail config for Ghost to be able to send emails. Direct mail is not as reliable as a 3rd party mail service, and emails may end up in spam, but you at least have a chance at getting the forgotten password email ;)

Additionally, we've improved the from address configuration. mail.fromaddress has been deprecated in favour of mail.from and now accepts either just an email address or a from address in the form: Custom name <mail@my-blog.com>. The default if left unset is Blog title <ghost@blog-url>, for more information see the mail guide on support.ghost.org.

Along with our new PRIVACY.md file, we've also added a new set of privacy config options to allow you to disable any of the features listed. In line with this, the updateCheck option has been deprecated in favour of privacy.useUpdateCheck. You can see all the new config options in the configuration guide on support.ghost.org.

For those of you keeping an eye on our JSON Data API, there's a shiny new configuration API endpoint which has been added to provide access to some of the configuration options. This was used to build the new about Ghost page which appears in settings.

Theme API changes

Ghost 0.5.2 includes the following additions and changes to the Theme API:

[New] {{is}} helper
[New] Custom tag templates
[New] {{image}} for posts
[Changed] {{body_classes}} outputs different classes
[Changed] {{ghost_head}} outputs pre & next links
[Changed] Meta title & description helpers

For full details of what has changed and details on how to use the new features, please see the theme change log.

Using Ghost as an npm module

If you've been using Ghost as an npm module, you'll need to update your custom code which requires ghost after upgrading to 0.5.2. You'll find instructions on how to this on the wiki page. Please also note that as we have switched our promise library from when to bluebird that you'll need to use catch for handling rejections rather than otherwise.

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

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users are being automatically updated and will be running Ghost 0.5.2 shortly. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.2 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by John O'Nolan, Paul Adam Davis, Fabian Becker, Hannah Wolfe, Jason Williams, Felix Rieseberg, Matt Enlow, Harry Wolff, Gabor Javorszky, Robert Jackson, Jilles Soeters, Nicola Mustone, Maurice Williams, David Blurton, Sebastian Gierlinger, Thai Phan, cobbspur, Andrej Mlinarević, hiroshi kobayashi, Ashish Dixit, Chris Pearce, Jake Wright, Jamie Knight, Jay Beavers, Josh Vanderwillik, Julien Gilli, Kirill Yakovenko, Mattias Cibien, Mo Valipour, Pedro Teixeira, Robert Rhoades and Sarah.

As of the meeting, we had all the intended features on the roadmap for this release sat ready and waiting to go. There are 7 major features in this release, which is a lot more than we expected to be packing for 0.5.2. All that's left now is to clean up the remaining bugs and blocker issues and we can push this out to the world.

Over the past few weeks, we've made a lot of progress not just on features, but also on cleaning up our backlog of issues on GitHub - even with the ongoing release-bug-finding madness, our issue count sits in the 160s, whereas two months ago that was well over 300. That's not just because we've been closing invalid issues, but because we've struck a great balance between working on issues from the backlog and developing new features. We're building new things and improving the code base and it's all very exciting.

The last week has seen a lot of outstanding UI bugs closed, as well as many more found and raised. We've also crammed in some refactoring and cleanup work to try to make the server side clearer and easier to work with as well as improve the Ghost start up sequence with much better error handling. We hope this will reduce some common difficulties with installing and upgrading by making them much easier to solve.

When do we release?

We're getting asked a lot of questions around when the code base is considered ready for release, when a release is done, and how to know it has been done or find the code in advance.

The first step in being ready for a release is that all the code we want in the release is merged into the codebase. The public roadmap lists the status of all the user-facing features that are intended to be in the release. Any issue or pull request that needs to be fixed or merged before the release is marked with the blocker label on GitHub.

As soon as everything is merged, you'll see a Release Candidate appear on the GitHub releases page. These are orange 'pre-releases', and are essentially the release minus any serious bugs that get found. The RC is created for testing purposes, it gives everyone a stable point to work from to check everything is a-ok.

Once we're happy that the RC is ok, or if there are bugs once they are resolved, the release will then happen at the next opportunity. At the moment, the process is pretty manual, long winded and done by me so it's always started in the morning UK time, this will change in future as we work on automating the release process.

If you're looking to see if the release has happened yet, the first place the release will appear will be on the GitHub releases page, followed by npm, the stable branch and Ghost.org. Meanwhile, Ghost(Pro) blogs are upgraded in the background.

After 0.5.2

With 0.5.2 nearly ready for release, it's time to start looking at what will make it into the next feature release. The roadmap is fully loaded, continuing the split focus between improving the admin panel to provide more features like auto save and the filter menu and adding enhancements to the theme API such as adding open graph tags and other structured data by default.

If there's a feature you'd like to help us build, come visit us in IRC and we'll give you a hand getting started!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 30th September, 5:30pm London time.

Another new member of the team, this month we're proud to welcome David Wolfe our latest addition. Many of you will already know him from the Ghost Forums; being Hannah's husband means he's been helping us in more ways than one since the very beginning.

Coming from a career as a department-head in the British NHS, David is returning to his more geeky roots full time and help us hack away on building Ghost. He's going to be heading up our VIP support and migration assistance for high-profile customers and blogs who are converting to Ghost.

Our third Ghost Foundation team member from the UK and our sixth in total. Onwards!

Find David on Github and of course, all over the Ghost Forums.

This week we've done a lot of work towards clearing up the user interface ready to do the next release. All the issues we absolutely need to resolve before we can release are now tagged with the next label. At the time of writing that's just 5 issues consisting of 3 bugs and 2 issues to do with the UI: #4047, #4031, #4016, #3810, #1961.

Ghost 0.5.2 is coming!

We have already fixed a number of important issues (like the post not saved and request entity too large bugs), and have new stuff ready to ship, so we're aiming to do a release early next week. Ghost 0.5.2 is set to include the design refresh, the about page, direct email (email without configuration), redesigned post settings menu which also adds support for post cover images and the {{#is}} helper.

Community Guidelines

A couple of weeks ago we finally published our community guidelines on Ghost.org. These guidelines are a statement of intent for how we want our community culture to grow and flourish - be that in IRC, on the forum, on GitHub and also in places like blog comments, our facebook page, and so on and so forth. These guidelines and all our public policies exist in our Policy repository.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 23rd September, 5:30pm London time.

Git has this great feature whereby you can execute arbitrary scripts whenever something happens on your git repository. A common use case for this is a pre-receive hook on the remote repository which prevents people with access from doing destructive actions, like force pushing, which are incredibly easy to do by accident.

Many projects use GitHub as their remote repository, and as GitHub is a service, they do not permit you to upload arbitrary scripts to run on their servers. Makes sense, but how then can you protect your codebase?

Turns out, from version 1.8.2, Git has a new pre-push hook that lets you do the same thing on your local repository. It's not as handy as setting it up on the remote for all your users, but it does allow you the developer to protect yourself from... yourself.

Setup the hook

For any repository you want to protect, you need to create a new file called pre-push in the .git/hooks directory and make sure the file has permission to be executed. Inside the file, you'll add the script you want to run, here's the one I use:

#!/bin/bash

protected_branch='master'
current_branch=$(git symbolic-ref HEAD | sed -e 's,.*/\(.*\),\1,')

if [ $protected_branch = $current_branch ]
then
    read -p "You're about to push master, is that what you intended? [y|n] " -n 1 -r < /dev/tty
    echo
    if echo $REPLY | grep -E '^[Yy]$' > /dev/null
    then
        exit 0 # push will execute
    fi
    exit 1 # push will not execute
else
    exit 0 # push will execute
fi

This checks if the current branch is master, and if so it will prompt you to confirm what you're doing. It doesn't detect whether you're doing a normal push, or a force push, as I prefer to have the confirmation on any push to master. This script is borrowed heavily from scripts by pixelhandler and Itty Bitty Labs. For anyone wondering, the weird use of grep is so that this works on Windows as well as *nix systems.

Once you've added this script to your .git/hooks/pre-push file, any push command which operates on the master branch will require confirmation. Simple, but very effective.

Note: If the confirmation doesn't appear for you, please check that you have a git version higher than 1.8.2 (run git --version on the command line) and also check that the pre-push file is executable (run chmod +x pre-push on the command line) and try again :)

We kept this week's meeting super-short, due to a timing clash with a certain event in Cupertino where more interesting announcements were being made ;)

The introduction of the Core Team last week has had a real positive impact on the project as we're no longer dependent on me for progress. This means I don't have to spend quite so much time on GitHub and have a little more time to focus on bigger picture things like Ghost's memory usage, and long term planning.

This week however, I am on a mission to reduce the PR list back down to as few open items as possible. I'm also working on getting a better understanding of Ghost's memory usage, and seeing if we can put together some tooling so that we have memory usage information as part of our build.

Toward 0.5.2

We've now got open PRs for all the user interface issues which prevent us from doing a release. Once those are merged, there will be some minor items to clean up, but nothing release blocking.

In addition, there are a number of feature PRs that have been merged, or which will hopefully get merged this week, and a few more which should be relatively quick to cross off. This means that we will be able to do a release next week, although we may hold it an extra week to cram in some extra awesome.

An update on Apps

Since we shifted our focus to the API, Ember, and then Multi-User, the Apps project has had almost no movement. Over the next couple of weeks, the open issues for the App project are going to get a review and an overhaul, to make them more independent and easier to pick up. We'll then continue to work on apps behind a config flag, until we're confident we have a usable toolkit.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 16th September, 5:30pm London time.

Much of the progress this week has been around the merge of the Ghost-UI repo back into Ghost. The merge has been completed, along with the history, and transfer of all open issues. There has also been more refactoring work completed, and we've unstuck ourselves from being able to update our dependency on downsize, meaning that we can make progress on more advanced excerpts.

Core Team

In this week's meeting we have announced that we are kicking off our new Core Team with two people: Matt Enlow (@novaugust) and Jason Williams (@jaswilli). A big thank you to them for agreeing to take on these roles. Our hope is that this will allow us to ship a lot more awesome stuff, much quicker.

In addition @pauladamdavis will also be getting commit rights on the Ghost repository, so that he can continue his work on the UI now that it is all in one repo.

New Workflow

Since releasing 0.5, we've made a lot of changes to our workflow so that we can avoid doing such large releases, and instead release little and often. This switch towards a more agile workflow has included a number of changes, some of which require a little more explanation.

The Roadmap

We have a new public roadmap in Trello, which is much easier to keep up-to-date. As issues progress they move from left to right, starting off in the 'backlog column' - which is a big unsorted todo list and eventually landing in the right most 'recently released' column. They also have coloured labels to indicate their status. You can find out more by visiting the roadmap.

The roadmap only lists new features, and is intended to be user-facing. Bugs and technical improvements remain only on GitHub. Once a feature hits one of the middle two columns, it will have a spec and a related issue in GitHub which is marked with the feature tag.

GitHub Milestones

Related to the roadmap, there are then two milestones in GitHub. The current, or 0.5.x Backlog which contains all the isues that are ready to be worked on (includes any features from the middle two columns of the roadmap) and the Future backlog, which much like the backlog on the roadmap, contains things which we know about but which we aren't ready to do just yet.

Releases and Versioning

The aim is to keep doing rolling releases, every time we feel like we've completed a couple of features that warrant shipping. The hope is to release every 2-4 weeks, bumping the minor version number (so 0.5.2, 0.5.3, etc). Some larger features, like Apps, or a new Editor would be worked on behind a config flag until they are ready. Turning off the config flag for a large feature is the kind of thing we might do a major version bump for (i.e 0.6).

The overall aim is to be more flexible about what is available to be worked on rather than sticking to projects and hopefully ship features to our users much faster as a result.

Towards 0.5.2

In order to get ready to do another release, we need to get the admin UI back up to scratch. This means getting the sub items from #3810 polished off and at least the first part of the new post settings menu. Progress on these had been hindered by the Ghost/Ghost-UI split and merger, but are ready to be worked on now

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 9th September, 5:30pm London time.

Ghost 0.5 was a landmark release, with large parts of the software almost entirely re-written. Inevitably with such a large release, we left a few bugs in. Ghost 0.5.1 contains fixes for those bugs that interfered with your ability to use Ghost's features.

Here's what's new:

• [Fixed] Casper not working in IE
• [Fixed] Cannot delete users on MySQL
• [Fixed] Lost work if logged out while editing
• [Fixed] Possible to downgrade Owner user
• [Fixed] If author changes post author they lose access to post
• [Fixed] Weird status code when authorising
• [Fixed] Errors when uppercase used in /ghost/ URL
• [Fixed] UUID validation error when importing
• [Fixed] No notification for errors when sending mail

You can see the full changelog for more details.

How to Upgrade

All Ghost(Pro) users have been automatically updated and are already running Ghost 0.5.1. You're welcome :)

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.5.1 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on our support site.

Enjoy!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, Felix Rieseberg, Jason Williams, Matt Enlow and Sebastian Gierlinger

We've had a couple of interesting developments in the codebase this week. Firstly, @jaswilli did an epic PR to switch our promise library from when to Bluebird, which we hope will bring improvements to both performance, and reliability. Secondly, @JoshWillik has refactored the Ghost startup, such that requiring Ghost no longer results in the express server starting. This moves us much closer to being useful as a package to include in other software and to exposing Ghost as express middleware.

0.5.1 Maintenance release

Out on the next branch, all the critical bugs have been fixed, ready to ship as 0.5.1. This morning (since the meeting) the 0.5.1 release has been cut and pushed to GitHub, npm and the stable branch.

Triaging the backlog

Over the past couple of weeks, there's been an effort to triage and close as many old issues as possible and cleanup our backlog. Moving forward we want to be leaner and cleaner with what issues are open. Issues which are bugs and features or technical improvements we actively want to work on will live in the 0.5.x backlog. Bugs should be a priority, if they are true bugs we don't want them hanging around for longer than 1 release if possible.

Any longer term issues which are not actively ready to work on will live in the future backlog, this list will stay minimal and mostly be old issues with lots of history. Feature requests that aren't likely to be worked on in the near future will be closed in favour of a card on the public roadmap. The aim is to make it much, much clearer what issues are ready to be worked on and make the backlog much easier to digest and become familiar with.

Core Team

We've been talking for a while now about having a concept of a 'Core Team': a group of contributors who lead development and help us to regularly ship high quality code. I have published an overview of the Core Team on the wiki which covers what it means and what makes someone likely to be considered for the role. In next week's meeting we'll announce who the first members will be.

End of Ghost-UI

Back in March we moved all of Ghost's SASS over to the Ghost-UI repository so that we no longer had a ruby dependency in the main Ghost repo. We hoped to turn the code into a Bootstrap-esque framework with reusable generic components.

Unfortunately this hasn't worked out. Managing issues across the two repositories is an administrative nightmare, and the switch to Ember means there's not really a good way to build components in a separate repo. This week we'll be switching Ghost-UI to use libsass to remove the ruby dependeny, and then move the SASS back to the Ghost repo.

Towards 0.5.2

In order to ship another feature release, we need to clean up after the GUI 2.0 design refresh (see
#3810), which in turn depends on us moving Ghost-UI back to the Ghost repo. Once this is done we hope to bash out a couple of the features which are made possible by the new Post Settings Menu design. We'll release 0.5.2 as soon as the bugs are fixed and we have a couple of worthy features ready to go.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 2nd September, 5:30pm London time.

Following such a large release, we've had a somewhat quieter week mostly focused on cleaning up old GitHub issues and fixing bugs. There have been ~5 major issues reported with 0.5 which are either fixed or being fixed, and the next branch will be released as 0.5.1 with just these fixes in a week or so.

Meanwhile, master has had a makeover, with the new 'GUI2' design refresh being merged in this week. The refreshed design focuses mostly around navigation and settings, giving us more freedom to build out future features. There are still some Ember bits and pieces which need wiring up for the new design, these are detailed in #3810.

Priorities for Ghost development are now:

1. Fix the remaining 0.5 bugs marked next ready for a maintenance release
2. Resolve issues with the new design so that we are ready to do a feature release again
3. Get new features that are on the roadmap ready to ship
4. Resolve as many of the bugs in the 0.5.x backlog as possible

With the new release cycle, development will continue this way. With the public roadmap determining which features will ship next, and the current backlog being kept full of other issues that we want to make progress with. Each month, we'll release a new version, perhaps with some in-progress features disabled by default. When major features land or feature sets are completed this will result in a minor version bump (i.e. to 0.6), but otherwise we'll keep incrementing 0.5 as and when we feel we have something worth releasing :)

Note on the npm package

Due to an inconsistency between grunt and npm's handling of file globbing, the original 0.5 npm package was missing the HTML email templates. Therefore the npm package is currently at 0.5.1-1, slightly ahead of everything else.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 26th August, 5:30pm London time.

After 5 months of hard work, resulting in 616 commits, we have successfully shipped Ghost 0.5 to a very excited and happy user base. When I say we in this context, I am referring to the 60+ wonderful people who contributed to Ghost since 0.4.2:

Jason Williams, Sebastian Gierlinger, Matt Enlow, Fabian Becker, Paul Adam Davis, David Arvelo, Jacob Gable, Maurice Williams, Harry Wolff, Andy Boutte, David Balderston, Robert Jackson, Felix Rieseberg, John O'Nolan, Gabor Javorszky, Steve Layton, Manuel Mitasch, Peter Szel, Lucas Holmquist, Ian Mitchell, Kevin Ansfield, Connor Tumbleson, Alan Richards, jomahoney, lennerd, Jason Sturges, Taras Mankovski, Martijn Swaagman, Marco Otte-Witte, Josh Kalderimis, Aia Patag, surgesoft, Andrew Schwartzmeyer, Brian White, David Blurton, Dmitry Mazuro, Erik Bryn, Glen E. Ivey, Hendrik Schaeidt, Jake Wright, Jarrett Cruger, Jarrod Mosen, Jesse Tane, Joel Fischer, Jordan Sexton, Justin Yek, Lev Gimelfarb, Luke Shiels, Nicola Mustone, Paul Connolley, Renyu Liu, Szél Péter, Tim Griesser, Waleed Ali, William Dibbern, Zach Schneider, cobbspur, fabfou, joeldrapper and sessa.

Each one of you is amazing, thank you! I cannot say this enough :)

What's next?

With a release as large and all-encompassing as 0.5, it was inevitable that we would need to do a maintenance release soon after. 0.5.1 will be released likely on 25th Aug, and contain a just a small set of bug fixes and minor tweaks to the functionality in 0.5.

In the meantime we're going to get to work on new features and functionality to ship in 0.5.2 sometime around 8th Sep. We'll continue working as we always do, with all the latest and greatest stuff going into the master branch. Any bug fixes which should go out in 0.5.1 will be cherry-picked by me out onto the next branch, from which the maintenance release will be cut.

With the new faster release process, we'll be working from the 0.5.x backlog, with a focus on the features outlined in the new public roadmap. The aim being to get at least 2 (but likely more) new features ready to ship as 0.5.2 in September alongside the general bug fixing and improvement work.

Earmarked for delivery in 0.5.2 are: a refresh of Ghost-Ui, about Ghost page, code injection, sitemaps and possibly more!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 19th August, 5:30pm London time.

Today we are releasing Ghost 0.5 - a massive technical progression and an exciting step forward for the Ghost blogging platform.

This release represents a total of 616 commits across 471 issues from 61 incredible contributors all over the world.

CodeName: MSR1 - this is the second release named for one of our 3 Kickstarter backers who pledged £1,000 to making Ghost a reality last year. A big thank you goes out to the MSR Group for their support on this release.

What's in The Box

By far the biggest release we've ever done, Ghost 0.5 is absolutely packed with new things. Here are the highlights:

Multi-User Support

This post, you may have noticed, is the first on the Ghost.org blog which is not written by John. Our flagship feature for this release is that Ghost now has support for multiple Authors, Editors and Administrators. Company, community and collaborative blogs are now all possible.

Public JSON API

Ghost is the first and only Open Source publishing platform to build a public JSON API. We're incredibly excited about the immense possibilities which this opens up for the future.

What does that mean, exactly? Just like Twitter and Pinterest have an API which developers can build apps on top of, Ghost has this power as well. This means that iOS, Android, Desktop and even Web Apps can now all be built on top of any Ghost blog.

Because Ghost is a self-consuming JSON API, every single feature which is in Ghost is available to 3rd party developers. Not just a subset; Everything.

In the very near future we'll be opening up authentication for the API via OAuth, In the meantime we'll be publishing documentation so that developers can start to get to grips with what's available.

Completely New Ember.js Admin

The Ghost admin area may look generally the same, but under the hood it is a brand new beast. In February of this year we made the decision to convert the Ghost web app (the admin app which consumes the JSON API) to use Ember.js.

What does that mean? Ghost is now a fully-featured client-side JavaScript application. Everything you do in the browser happens in real time. We're now able to start building user-interface components which look and feel like what you might expect from a desktop (or mobile) operating system.

A Bedrock for The Future

These 3 flagship features cement the future of Ghost. We've spent a long time laying the foundations for a solid, stable application which can grow and scale effectively. Multi-user support has opened up an enormous amount of new use-cases for Ghost as a piece of software. The JSON API has infinitely expanded the possibilities for Ghost as a development platform. The Ember.js Admin is going to allow us to ship new features and functionality fast. Really fast.

A Whole 2nd Box of Things

As well as those three giants, there's practically a whole second box full of improvements and features which we're shipping today:

• Casper 1.0 - Our default theme has had massive update with beautiful new user profile pages, full-bleed homepage cover images, restructured navigation, improved mobile styles, and a massive improvement to typography contributed by Jake Giltsoff from Typekit.
• Privacy.md - Ghost is leading the way with a new Open Source initiative called Privacy.md. We now ship a text file with a plain English description of every feature within the software which might affect user Privacy.
• New Install Screen - A refined UI when installing a new Ghost blog.
• OAuth Support - for extensible, secure authentication with less hassle.
• Theme API improvements - New helpers, functionality, and tools for theme developers. More here.
• Auto-GZip - Theme assets are now automatically GZipped in production environments. This makes your blog load faster.
• Improved Keyboard Shortcuts - New navigational shortcuts and international (non-English) keyboard support.
• Mobile Improvements - Better support on touch based devices.
• HTML Emails - All system emails now sent in a beautiful HTML email template (with plaintext fallback).
• Hundreds of bugfixes and minor improvements
• Much, much more

How to Upgrade

Gotcha! Ghost(Pro) subscribers have already been upgraded to 0.5. Enjoy it, and thank you so much for your support!

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you will need to download Ghost 0.5 and then check out the upgrade documentation. If you're using the default Casper theme without modifications, be sure to drop in a fresh copy of that - too!

A New Release Cycle

After a lot of consideration, we believe we've made significant error in how we do our releases. Until now we've blindly followed how other Open Source projects do software releases: 2-3 releases a year with fixed milestones and feature-sets. Each time a release comes around, it's a big event and everyone has to upgrade (like right now).

If you look at it objectively: this model is good for precisely nobody. Developers have to wait 3-6 months to see how users respond to their work, and then iterate on it another 3-6 months after that. For users who have to upgrade, the release cycle is always either too long or too short. Both are understandably frustrating.

All of this is also a pretty archaic way of working, for web based software development in 2014.

So we're going to change it up.

Ghost is about experimenting and doing things differently. It's about building the best possible product for writers and publishers. To do that, we need to build fast, ship fast, and learn fast.

Starting today, we're moving to a more agile release process. Every 2-4 weeks we're going to ship new features, improvements and bug-fixes to Ghost. There won't be any more big-bang events like this one. There will be smaller, more frequent announcements that we've released new features, fixes and improvements.

These releases will be rolled out automatically to all Ghost(Pro) users as and when they happen. No input required. We'll let you know when there's cool new stuff on your blog - and you concentrate on using it. Then, 2-4 weeks later we'll ship the next round of improvements based on your feedback.

For self hosted users, you can update any time you like. We'll also push update notifications 4x a year, or whenever there is a critical security update.

Want to know what's coming up next? Check out our new feature roadmap and follow along with progress as it happens.

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by...

Hannah Wolfe, Jason Williams, Sebastian Gierlinger, Matt Enlow, Fabian Becker, Paul Adam Davis, David Arvelo, Jacob Gable, Maurice Williams, Harry Wolff, Andy Boutte, David Balderston, Robert Jackson, Felix Rieseberg, John O'Nolan, Gabor Javorszky, Steve Layton, Manuel Mitasch, Peter Szel, Lucas Holmquist, Ian Mitchell, Kevin Ansfield, Connor Tumbleson, Alan Richards, jomahoney, lennerd, Jason Sturges, Taras Mankovski, Martijn Swaagman, Marco Otte-Witte, Josh Kalderimis, Aia Patag, surgesoft, Andrew Schwartzmeyer, Brian White, David Blurton, Dmitry Mazuro, Erik Bryn, Glen E. Ivey, Hendrik Schaeidt, Jake Wright, Jarrett Cruger, Jarrod Mosen, Jesse Tane, Joel Fischer, Jordan Sexton, Justin Yek, Lev Gimelfarb, Luke Shiels, Nicola Mustone, Paul Connolley, Renyu Liu, Szél Péter, Tim Griesser, Waleed Ali, William Dibbern, Zach Schneider, cobbspur, fabfou, joeldrapper and sessa.

Thank you all!

Ghost 0.5 is available right now on Ghost.org. Ghost(Pro) subscribers have already been upgraded and can simply log in to check out the new features.

We're into the final stages of preparing for releasing Ghost 0.5. The second Release Candidate has been published, and we've announced our plan to release on Monday 11th August. Unlike the last major release, this time I wanted to give theme developers a heads-up on what's changing in advance.

Ghost 0.5 has largely been a refactoring project, finished off with the implementation of Multi-User. Although there haven't been many general improvements to the theme API, the additon of multiple user support to Ghost provides some new toys for theme developers to play with.

What is Multi-User?

Until now, Ghost has been a single-user blog. That meant that all the posts were always written by the same person - the blog owner. All that is about to change.

From 0.5, it will be possible to invite people to join your blog, so posts can have different authors. From a theming perspective, this has two main effects: first, a post's author has more significance if the blog is multi-user and second, the difference between blog settings such as the title, cover image and logo are now clearly different to a user's cover image and logo.

What's new?

Author Pages

Similar to the tag pages feature that was released in 0.4.2, Ghost 0.5 supports author pages. An author page contains a paginated list of posts for a specific author, and can be accessed by visiting the url: /author/author-slug/. Authors also have an RSS feed for their posts.

Author pages will be rendered by either the new author.hbs template, or default to index.hbs if author.hbs is not present. Similarly to tag pages, author pages have access to an author object as well as a posts object.

As usual, the {{url}} helper will generate a correct url for an author page, when in an author context:

{{#author}}
<a href="{{url}}">{{name}}</a>
{{/author}}

The {{author}} helper will now output this <a> tag structure, as opposed to just the author's name as it did in 0.4.2.

Note: there is a difference between the {{author}} helper, and the {{#author}}{{/author}} context block. You can see an example of these features in use in the updated Casper theme

The {{plural}} helper

The only non-multi-user specific new feature for themes in 0.5, the {{plural}} helper has been aded to make formatting meta information about posts, tags etc a little nicer.

{{plural pagination.total empty='No posts' singular='% post' plural='% posts'}}

The plural helper takes a number and three strings to output depending on whether the number is zero, singular or plural. The most common usecase for this is outputting information about how many posts there are in total in a collection. For example, themes have access to pagination.total on the homepage, a tag page or an author page.

New home.hbs and author.hbs templates

Author pages will be rendered with the new author.hbs if one is available, or alternatively fall back to index.hbs.

Similarly, there's a new template you can use to do something different with your homepage. If present, home.hbs will be used to render only the very first page of a blog. If it is not present index.hbs will be used, and index.hbs is still used for the second, and third etc pages of the blog.

Updates to the {{#has}} helper

The final new thing for 0.5, the {{#has}} helper has been updated to support an author attribute. This means you can check if a post is authored by a particular user:

{{#post}}
    {{#has author="Joe Bloggs"}}
        ...do something if the author is Joe Bloggs
    {{else}}
        ...do something if the author is not Joe bloggs
    {{/has}}
{{/post}}

See the 0.4.2 post or the documentation for more details of the {{#has}} helper.

Potentially breaking changes

{{author}} now outputs HTML

As explained above, prior to 0.5 the {{author}} helper would output the author's name in string form. In 0.5 this has been updated to output a link to the author page, the equivalent of doing:

{{#author}}
<a href="{{url}}">{{name}}</a>
{{/author}}

If you do not want the author tag to output a link you can use {{author autolink="false"}}.

{{author.email}} no longer accessible

It was felt that the author's email address being publicly available was a privacy violation. Rather than adding an option to enable or disable this, it has been removed. {{author.email}} will now output an empty a string.

Get ready for Multi-User

We recommend that all themes make the following three amends:

1. Add a new author.hbs template for awesome author pages
2. Ensure that your post output features the {{author}} tag so that readers can easily navigate to these pages
3. Take this opportunity to check your theme is up-to-date with features from 0.4.0 and 0.4.2 as we are transitioning to a much faster release cycle, and deprecated features will be removed soon.

Although the changes required to support Multi-User are small and quick, Casper has had a significant upgrade for 0.5 to make authors more prominent in the design. We hope that many of you will also take this opportunity to upgrade your themes to help make Multi-User an awesome new feature for Ghost bloggers.

There has been significant progress towards releasing 0.5 since last week's meeting. All the remaining open issues for the Multi-User project were closed, the first Release Candidate was cut, and ~50 bugs were raised against it. Those bugs have all been triaged and assigned to either be closed before this release or punted to a later release. Already ~40 bugs have been fixed, we're back down to just a handful of bugs, and RC2 is expected to be cut shortly*.

From here, we'll run through testing again with RC2, find and fix any further bugs and hopefully deliver a final Release Candidate on Friday.

The official public release of Ghost 0.5 is scheduled to happen on Monday 11th August.

IT'S LESS THAN A WEEK AWAY FOLKS!

Between now and the release, we're hoping for lots more testing, particularly around the upgrade process. Test-only PRs are very, very welcome, as there's quite a lot of low coverage throughout the app. Additionally, we'd love suggestions on how to improve the upgrade and install documentation to make Monday's release as smooth as possible.

* Update: Release Candidate 2 has been published

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 12th August, 5:30pm London time.

For the past 3 weeks, despite impressive progress, we've hovered at the ~40 open issue mark in the Multi-User backlog This week we're at less than 30 issues, and looking good to half that in the next 24-48 hours. With this in mind, we are aiming to ship the first RC for 0.5 on Thursday.

The largest part of what is left is cleaning up bits of the UI so that less privileged users don't see controls and resources that they aren't able to interact with. The API has a full suite of permissions controlling who can do what, but the admin UI needs to be updated to reflect some of that. Determining the best approach for some of this was a large part of today's meeting.

There is also a large amount of testing, both in terms of writing tests to ensure coverage, and physically testing out the code that needs to happen before we can be sure the code is ready to release. If you have some free time, please do check out master and take it for a test run!

At present, we don't have any contributors who are championing an effort to bring postgres support into line with our SQLite and MySQL support. As a result of this postgres support is falling behind rather than catching up. Currently the build fails, and it's quite likely that 0.5 won't work with postgres unless someone gives it some attention.

It usually takes 8-10 days to get from a first RC to a release, and we'll set a firm date for the release of MU in next week's meeting.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 5th August, 5:30pm London time.

Multi-user remains the focus, as we work towards getting it ready to ship. There has been significant progress this week, as we move towards having a UI that reflects the role of the signed in user. We're punting unnecessary work whereever we can without impacting code quality. This week has seen major changes to the code base and test suites, such that the Travis-CI build runs significantly faster which should help to speed up development time.

Casper has had a major overhaul ready for Multi-User, anyone grabbing the latest master of Ghost or Casper will see the shiny new version. Please help us out by testing new Casper on your blogs!

After Multi-User has shipped, we're going to be making some pretty big changes to how we manage our releases. The aim will be to do a release with a couple of new features at least once a month. In between the main releases, we're going to move towards doing smaller 'optional' releases. Optional releases will be automatically shipped to Ghost(Pro), but will not trigger an update notification in self-hosted Ghost. We will provide an alternative method to subscribe for notifications of the optional releases.

We're also in the process of creating a new public roadmap where our users can find out what features are coming when. This new roadmap focuses more on features, and is designed to work with the new release cycle. The hope is that this will provide more visibility on which features are priority and when you can expect to see them on your blog.

In the short term, we continue to work torwards shipping MU as soon as possible. We rely on community contributions in order to deliver, so please help out if you can.

Want to help us ship?

There are a number of beginner issues in the backlog, and that will likely continue as finding small bugs and niggles is common as we move towards a release candidate. These issues are ideal for people new to the Ghost codebase.

If you're looking to help us ship Multi-User, both developers and non-developers can give us a hand by grabbing the latest master, testing it and raising any issues you come across.

Instructions for installing locally can be found in the contribution guide.

As always if you need a helping hand getting up and running, our developers hang out in the #ghost IRC channel on freenode and are always willing to help.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 29th July, 5:30pm London time.

We have missed the deadline for delivering all the new features required to deliver multi-user. Issues like the permissions model being more complex than originally thought are causing things to take longer than expected. A revised deadline of Friday 18th July for all feature PRs was agreed during the meeting. Anyone & everyone with time to give us a hand delivering this milestone - please get involved!

One major development this week, was the discovery & implementation of the model-registry plugin for Bookshelf. This removes the circular dependency problem from our models which was hampering progress. Whilst having no visible effect, improvements like this significantly advance our ability to deliver new features quickly.

The Ghost admin client now authenticates with the server via oAuth. Shortly, we will also be adding oAuth to the API so that the API can be used externally to Ghost (help wanted). Sebgie has done an excellent write-up of how oAuth works in Ghost for those who are interested in this.

Ghostalk, the weekly Ghost podcast is about to publish it's 21st episode, and final installment in this season, so keep an eye out for that! We also recommend checking out episode 20 with John O'Nolan.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 22nd July, 5:30pm London time.

So you're short on time. You've got a deadline, and you really need to get your post published. There's no flexibility for perfectionism, this time, there is simply point A, point B, and the chasm between the two.

Allow me to introduce you to the fastest way to put proverbial pen-to-paper and send that blockbuster post down the production line in the shortest time possible.

The drag

When I first started blogging, it was like torture. Even when I had a good idea for a blog post, I'd still sit there for hours wondering how best to put it together. Would it get read? Was it good enough?

There would be the inevitable research period of just gathering all the information needed for the post, followed by the cross-checking of every other possible angle of that research. Then the writing began. Sporadically. Stop, start, stop, start. Start again.

I was always trying to find a narrative, but failing to grasp where (if anywhere) the story was actually going.

It wasn't the best system. It wasn't really a system at all. I could burn through hours - if not days - just trying to write that one great post. Often, I never even made it to the end.

Here's what I changed

Once I realised (Thanks RescueTime) how many hours I was burning through in return for very little, I decided to make some changes to my workflow. The result was taking my content production time from 6 hours down to about 60 minutes.

Come up with ideas in advance

The worst thing about blogging is sitting around staring at a blank screen and trying to think of what to write about. You need to know exactly what you're going to write, before you sit down to start writing it. Come up with ideas for blog posts in advance, make a list, and then sit down and write.

Don't waste time wondering. This part should already be done.

Create an outline, every time

Got your idea? Good. Now instead of starting to write a big long meandering post that may or may not arrive at a conclusion, break it down into steps.

Outlines vary based on what kind of post you're writing, but ultimately - this is the one that I come back to again and again:

1. Introduction of the thing
2. Value of the thing
3. The THING
4. Case study of the thing
5. Conclusion

Whatever your outline is: break it into bullet points that go sensibly from a beginning to a middle to an end. Getting these points written down is the catalyst for the rest of your post.

As Belle over at Buffer once said:

Something I’ve learned from experience and from reading advice from other writers is that there comes a point when you need to shake yourself out of research mode and force yourself to start writing. Getting words on the page is that huge push that it takes for a boulder to start moving. As soon as you get that done, you’ve got the momentum to keep going.

I've found that creating an outline is one of the best ways of doing this.

Check off the easy bits

Look at the steps in your outline. Now write 100-200 words for number 1 (introduction), number 5 (conclusion), number 2 (value), then number 4 (case study). Those are the easy parts.

Your introduction should grab people's attention and lure them in.

Your conclusion should summarise the most important things that you want people to take away from your post (if they skip the entire article and only read this paragraph, they should be able to get the gist of it).

Your value explanation should tell people why they should care about what you're about to say. What benefit will it have to their lives if they keep reading?

Your case study should give a concrete example of what you're saying in action. It can be a quote, a story, an experience or anything else that backs up your point and leads nicely into the conclusion.

Done all that? Awesome. You've covered roughly 700 words at this point, which means you're about half done. Try to aim for 1200-1500 words in a post whenever possible. This is the length that generally performs best both for humans as well as search engines.

Fill in the gaps

Now fill in the gaps by writing the actual body of your post. Keep it simple. Say what you want to say clearly and concisely.

Don't try to come up with complex theories or write about things you're not clear on. Stand on the shoulders of giants. The internet is full of incredible content which you can link to, quote, and reference.

Try to give the maximum value to your reader - not be a know-it-all. Sometimes that means sending your audience to other places.

Don't forget to use simple writing tools to keep the quality of your content high as you go along. Guide your reader through the story. Hold their hand. Make them feel warm and fuzzy and happy as they frolic from heading to heading.

Get checked

Write drunk, edit sober.

– Ernest Hemingway

One of the most liberating ways to speed up your writing is to absolve yourself from the responsibility of editing it.

Just write.

Get the words down onto "paper" as fast as you can. Allow the content to flow freely. There are going to be some good paragraphs and some bad paragraphs - but ideally - you're going to let someone else decide which those are.

Having an editor (or really, just a friend) to proof-read your content serves two purposes. First: It means you'll be less shy about getting words out, cause you don't have to "fix them all" later. Second, it gives you the point of view of someone else. Is everything clear? Is there an area that needs more detail? What does that mean, exactly? You can learn a tremendous amount from someone who isn't as close to the subject material as you are.

Getting your work checked by someone else is far less about grammar and spelling (really, some app on your computer should be able to handle that) and far more about input on the content itself.

Pull the trigger

Once it's all done - get it out there. That may be in the form of adding it to a publishing schedule, or it may simply be pulling the trigger on the publish button. The most important thing is not to wait. Sitting on content makes it go stale. The longer you wait, the less relevant it becomes.

(and, if you're anything like me, the more likely you are to hate it)

What to do next

Get off the procrastination bandwagon! Writing blog posts can be hard, but it doesn't have to be. It's a case of finding a system that works for you and then sticking to it. For me, writing an outline and then building it out, piece-by-piece, increased my writing speed by about 600%.

Give these steps a try and see how they work for you...

1. Consult your list of blog post ideas and choose one indiscriminately.
2. Bash out an outline as quickly as possible. Spend no more than 10 minutes on this.
3. Fill out each section starting with the easiest bits. This creates writing momentum which will help you finish.
4. Phone a friend for review and suggestions for improvement.
5. Pull the publish trigger and set your content free.

Stop the clock.

How quickly did you manage to complete all the steps? There's nothing more motivating than working to a timed deadline!

Update: One more really obvious tip for writing faster is to use Markdown. Check out our full Markdown guide for the nitty gritty.

Photo by Alden Jewell

There's one thing that separates great blog posts from the rest: Giving the reader what they truly, deeply want.

If you find yourself writing post after post but being less than overwhelmed by the response, it might be time to sharpen up those blogging techniques and try something new.

No other format of writing is so diverse in its distribution, and no other format has such massive reach with such a low barrier to entry.

But that doesn't mean it's easy.

The internet is as busy and crowded as its ever been. There have never been more bloggers clamouring for attention than you will find today. Quality and credibility, now, are the driving differentiators.

So that's what these 12 tools are about. Helping you understand what factors make the difference between the viral blog and the single-celled internet Amoeba.

Tell your story

Your story is the thing that makes people care about what you're saying. Or not. It's the bit that makes it possible for your reader to relate to you. To become a part of it, rather than just a party to it. It is, in many ways, the magic that holds all written content together.

Blogging about business, Alex Turnbull found that almost 300% more people read to the end of a post on the GrooveHQ blog when he included conscious narrative elements in the introduction.

Thanks to science, our brains are hard-wired to relate to stories more than any other type of content. We don't just read and understand a story, we place ourselves into it and go along for the ride.

This is not the logical part of the brain, it's the emotional part. When it comes to decision-making, it's the emotions that win almost every time.

Be direct

The easiest type of writing, and the easiest type of speaking, is rambling. Run-on sentences and meandering paragraphs are sure to accomplish one thing very successfully: boring your reader.

Every year the average human attention span shortens. Online, this paradigm is magnified intensely. This year, the average attention span of a web user is down to just 8 seconds; roughly equivalent to a goldfish.

You have but a short window in which to capture the attention of your reader and communicate something important to them. Now, more than ever, is the time to be blunt about it.

Get to the point

They say the most important part of video editing is the first 10-seconds. The same is true for blogging, translated roughly to the first 3 sentences.

Before you can even start being direct, you have to get your reader past the first paragraph. Why should they bother to read any further if you can't capture their attention in the first place?

Try opening with your conclusion. Share the point of your post right up front, then the tell the story of how you got there. Surprise, intrigue and controversy are all things which keep people reading.

Show, don't tell

Use words to drive home the point you want to make. Back up those words with images which prove what you're saying is true.

It can be hard to find an image for every context, but when it's possible it has a significant effect. Humans (especially lazy humans, like us web users) are very visual creatures.

A study by Buffer found that Tweets with images received 150% more retweets than their counterparts without.

Jeff Bullas points out that (on average) articles with images get 94% more total views, press releases with images get 45% more views, and on Facebook stories with images are shared 37% more often.

Set the scene

Close your eyes for a moment and imagine this:

You're sat, quietly, watching your monitor in stunned disbelief. You didn't expect it. You didn't realise that this was going to happen to you today. Your hand shakes as you reach for the mouse and hit "Reply". Your server hiccups indignantly under the load of a million visitors. You only write two words: "Thanks, @aplusk."

Wouldn't that be nice?

Help your reader explore their imagination. Place them into the picture which you're painting and make them the main character. Be selfless to allow your reader to be selfish.

Arrange your words

One of the most common errors which newbie bloggers make is to ignore (or rather, not pay extra special attention to) formatting. Arguably, formatting has the largest influence of all on how much (and what parts) of your post are read.

If the user who spends 8 seconds on a page is our most common visitor, the second most common is the skim-reader.

You can complain about how unfair it is that nobody can be bothered to read properly any more, or you can see it as an opportunity and a challenge. Can you communicate the most important parts of your post to someone on a subway, looking at a tiny screen, in the space of just 1-2 minutes?

Break up your big blocks of text into manageable chunks. Use headings as a roadmap of where you're going. Try highlighting the most important passages which you would like people to notice.

It really works.

Reference the things

Just because it's written on the internet doesn't necessarily mean it's true. Why should I believe you?

Support your stories and opinions with facts. Call it "data driven" - call it "backed by science" - call it whatever you want. Reliable information is often hard to come by. Demonstrating that you are a credible authority on your subject of choice is a sure-fire way to dramatically up the quality of your posts.

Less hearsay. More juicy footnotes.

Social proof

Who else has talked about this subject? Surround yourself with people who are smart and if you're lucky you might be considered smart by association. Citing experts in the field which you're writing about indicates that you know who is worth citing.

All of this takes practice, of course, but the KISSmetrics blog has some great advice about how to ask influencers for killer quotes as just one example of how you can bolster your writing with credibility.

Because:

1. you gain exposure to a new audience, and 2) your content becomes more reputable because you’re associating yourself with an influencer in your industry.

Compare & contrast

Occasionally the best way to communicate something new is to point out the similarities and differences between it and something old. Take a concept which is easy to relate to and subvert it.

You see this in startups all the time when they write elevator pitches to communicate what they do in the fastest way possible:

• "It's basically Twitter, for photographs"
• "Basecamp, for musicians"
• "Paypal, but not shit"

Building on a reference point which is already known and understood can often cause an "aha" moment of understanding.

Summarise

Many of your readers are going to skim read, and some aren't going to read at all. Most people who do read anything, however, will read the first and the last paragraphs of your post.

Try to summarise all of your most important points in the introduction and the conclusion. Even if it's an abridged version, you should be able to cover all your bases.

Keep it succinct.

Call to action

Your call to action is the thing that you want people to do after having read your post. What is that?

Do you want them to read another post? Buy a product? Leave a review? Click on a link? Think about something important?

Your call to action should be crystal clear, and easy to find (regardless of what it is). Your post is effectively one big build up to the call to action. The thing that the reader should do next.

It often helps if there's a brightly coloured button.

Practice

As Brian Clark rightly points out, there are only 10 effective steps to becoming a better writer:

1. Write.
2. Write more.
3. Write even more.
4. Write even more than that.
5. Write when you don’t want to.
6. Write when you do.
7. Write when you have something to say.
8. Write when you don’t.
9. Write every day.
10. Keep writing.

What to do next

Probably not everything at the same time! It might be easier to focus on perfecting the use of these techniques one by one until you start to feel comfortable jumping between them. Give yourself time to get acquainted.

1. Have a look at some of the blogs which you read every day. Can you spot any of these tools in action?
2. Go back over one of your posts and see if you can revise any sections to be more clear and concise.
3. Decide what you would like your readers to understand or accomplish as a result of reading your writing. Does the rest of your post reinforce that mission?

Update: Enjoy this post? You'll probably love our Ultimate Guide to Markdown to get the most out of your writing!

What other techniques have you found to be particularly effective for reader engagement when structuring your posts?

Photo by Rick Nunn

The pulse for the last week looks a little slower that the two weeks before. We have had less people working on the project, but also the pieces of the Multi-User project are much bigger than the small clean-up issues we have been working on for Ember. All that being said, we've delivered a few big and important pieces of Multi-User this week - it's now possible to invite a user to your blog!

During the meeting, we punted a number of issues over to a new 0.5.x Milestone. We're totally focused on delivering Multi-User, but once that milestone (and the enormous amount of refactoring that comes with it) is out of the way, we will start releasing more frequently. We're left with ~40 issues, most of which are assigned and expected to be finished within the next week. As always, we are still looking for more people to help us wrap this project up.

We also had a discussion around the proposed PRIVACY.md document. This is a new file, that will live in the root directory just like the popular SECURITY.md, which describes all of the features of Ghost which may be considered to have an effect on privacy, all the way down to the use of Google Fonts. This document provides absolute transparency as to what the Ghost software does, and we hope the concept will be adopted by the OS community.

Finally this week, we planned a core developer Google hangout for 6:30pm on Thursday.

Next week, we'll be putting together a plan for how to test the extensive changes coming in 0.5 ready to release it. Anyone willing to get involved with testing will be very much appreciated.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 15th July, 5:30pm London time.

I thought I'd make these pulse screenshots a regular thing in the meeting write-ups. They're a great way to visualise and compare how active we've all been, and it gets the faces of our awesome contributors in the post. No so many different people this week, but we've closed the same number of issues. Awesome.

This week all of the major pieces of the Ember admin were completed. The Ember admin is now the admin. The old backbone admin has been removed, and the Ember.js version is now served from /ghost/ instead of /ghost/ember/. Whoohoo!

During this week's meeting I asked whether people wanted to continue having 2 open Milestones keeping Ember and MU issues separate, or move the final bits from the Ember.js milestone to the Multi-User milestone and move on. There was a pretty clear consensus, so the Ember.js milestone is now closed, and everyone is looking towards delivering Multi-User.

There are still 2 pretty big phases of MU to deliver, so we've updated our timelines. The first phase aims to make it possible to invite a user, accept an invite, and login as different users. The second phase aims to clean up the permissions around what each level of user (owner, admin, editor and author) can see and do. The first phase closes for PRs at the next meeting on the 8th of July. Phase 2 closes on the 15th of July. At that point we will go into a testing and release phase.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 8th July, 5:30pm London time.

This week has seen epic progress on the Ghost repo:

In fact, during yesterdays meetings these stats were even more epic, but I forgot to take a screenshot :(

Wrapping up Ember

I cannot thank our contributors enough for the hardwork they have put in to completing the Ember admin project. We've closed around 60 issues against the Ember milestone in the past week! At the time of writing, there are 15 issues remaining and we're set to be able to close the milestone shortly.

We've managed to push the Ember admin project so that we've not just built the same thing we had, but found ways to improve. Once the last couple of big pieces (OAuth and the forgotten password flow) land, it'll be time to switch the admin to the Ember admin completely. I'm hoping to get this done by the end of the weekend!

Moving on to Multi-User

The next project is an enormously important milestone for Ghost: shipping multi-user. This change will drive Ghost adoption by allowing more diverse user groups to switch to Ghost. I cannot wait to be able to offer this to people!

The Multi-User milestone has been populated with a set of around 40 issues, most of them quite small. They have also been split into two phases as described in the Multi-User Epic issue which should allow us to progress quickly towards having MU support working and then add MU features and clean up bits of permissions.

The first phase is intended to be done by the end of the weekend, and the second phase by Friday 4th July. This means that by the meeting after next, everything should be merged and we should be ready to start the pre-release testing & cleanup phase. This is a super tight deadline, but it ensures that we can deliver MU in the first half of July.

In order to meet the deadline, we're going to need to keep up our activity levels. If there's anyone out there looking to start contributing, please come by #ghost on freenode and we'll help you get stuck in.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 1st July, 5:30pm London time.

It's been 2 weeks since we had a meeting, but those two weeks have seen a flurry of activity. We're all pushing to wrap up the Ember admin and get it up to standard. We've got just a week left to wrap up the main pieces, but if things continue as we are, we might just make it:

There are a few big blockers left in the Ember admin:

1. Validations - In progress by @darvelo
2. Mobile Support - We need to determine a strategy for Ember #2333
3. Keyboard Shortcuts - In progress by @novaugust
4. Wiring in Ember Data - In progress by @jaswilli
5. Tests - In progress by @erisds & @rjackson

Almost everything is in progress, with most pieces likely to land in the next couple of days. For more details of each of these items, including what's needed, why and the issues related and dependencies see the comment on #2271.

There are also a few big pieces of functionality which are still missing:

1. OAuth #2759 - In progress by @sebgie
2. Forgotten Password Flow #2843 In progress by @javorszky
3. Mobile Editor #2957 - Needs assignee
4. Debug Screen #2847 - Needs assignee
5. Error Pages #2851 - Needs assignee

Aside from these things, the remaining issues in the Ember admin are all small bug fixes, tweaks and minor changes to make sure the new admin functions exactly as per the old admin. There is still plenty to do and room for more contributors to pick pieces up and get stuck in.

The deadline for PRs for the 10 items listed above is the next meeting (24th June). It's expected that there'll still be loose ends to tie up, but provided these major pieces are in we should be on track.

Multi-User

Next week, we'll be starting in earnest on multi-user. I've opened an Epic Issue which details the various pieces and also the flows we'll need to implement for MU. The issues outlined here will materialise over the coming week. Additonally, a roadmap for Ghost-Ui is currently being planned to ensure we get all the new pieces of interface on time. This will be published shortly for any one looking to get involved in the HTML & Sass side of things.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 24th June, 5:30pm London time.

It's been a short week this week, and also please note that next week there will not be a meeting. This week's meeting was mostly a very large and in depth catchup on all the various issues that are open in the Ember milestone.

There are ~48 open issues in the Ember milestone. At least a half of them are assigned and in progress, with a further 1/4 bugs and small related issues that will likely be resolved by one of the main issues. There are still a handful of unassigned open issues to grab and also no doubt countless small issues we've missed, and bits of cleanup or refactoring work that anyone is welcome to send us PRs for.

Roadmap Update

The Ghost Roadmap, and the milestones on GitHub have been updated with a new timeline, with an aim to ship Ghost 0.5 with multi-user support at the beginning of July. To that end, the aim is that all the currently open and assigned issues will have a PR in time for the next meeting in 2 weeks on 17th June. The following week will be spent wrapping up the final pieces of the Ember admin, which will close for PRs 23rd June.

We will then have one final week to focus on wrapping up the last pieces of Multi-User, which should be mostly complete by this time, with the Multi-User milestone closing to PRs on 1st July. At this point we will follow our standardrelease procedure, aiming to release the following week.

These timelines are incredibly ambitious, however it is already more than 2 months since our last release and we need to push forward and deliver something awesome to our users. We've recently gained a few new regular contributors, who are really helping us to push forward faster, so we are aiming high. I'm particularly excited about delivering the Ember admin, because of what it means in terms of delivering other features more quickly in future.

Wrapping up Ember

To help us get a bit of a booster on the Ember admin, we have @rjackson, a.k.a rwjblue on IRC, who is a member of the Ember core team helping us to get past some of the problems we've encountered. To that aim, he will be hosting a Google hangout on Wednesday at 5:30pm UK time, to go over some high level concepts and help shape some parts of the admin which are proving tricky. This is open to anyone who is or wants to work on the Ghost Ember admin.

Update: For details of what happened during the hangout see the IRC logs or @halfdan's write-up.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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.

Note: There will not be a meeting next week,. Hope to see you at the next meeting: Tuesday 17th June, 5:30pm UK time.

This week's meeting was a shortened 'catchup' meeting held on Wednesday as we were unable to do a proper meeting on Tuesday.

Over the past week, I have been on a bit of a rampage on GitHub, trying to close as much stuff as I can, get the PR list back under one page (25 PRs) and attempting to reduce the open issues down as low as possible (aiming for ~200) to make things more manageable. After this, I'll start working on improving the roadmap, making it a bit clearer with milestones and deadlines fleshed out ready to discuss in next week's meeting.

There is now quite a bit of work going on towards shipping multi-user, as we're now far enough along with Ember to start on it and not everyone wants to work on Ember / frontend stuff. We hope to wrap up Ember and ship multi-user around the same sort of time as Ghost 0.5, hopefully pretty soon.

Two little bits of news: firstly, @pauladamdavis is now making a bit of a surge on Ghost-Ui. He has commit access and is pretty much taking the lead on that project. If there are any Ghost-Ui issues impeding the Ember migration project, please contact him for help. Secondly, @sebgie now has commit access to Ghost, he will be taking on a little bit more PR management, particularly whilst I am on holiday 6th-16th June.

There is still quite a lot of work outstanding on the Ember project, most notably that we need to complete the work to integrate Ember data so that the admin works with real blog data, and integrate all of the more complex bits and pieces around validation, progress, etc. In next weeks meeting, I hope to be able to set a firm deadline for when we will complete the work.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode (note that the UK has just moved onto Daylight Savings Time, so the meeting is an hour earlier than it was previously). 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 3rd June, 5:30pm London time.

This week's meeting was brought to you from the first official Ghost Team meetup in Egypt. This is the first time our distributed team has all been together in the same room (with the exception of Sarah, who is definitely here in spirit) and we are going to use this rare opportunity to put our heads together and hack on / spec out a few key Ghost features, including feature / cover images, multi-user, and the dashboard.

We won't be able to have all of these things completed by the time we leave, but we do want to ensure we have a clear plan for how to implement each of these features, as well as remove a few blockers. You will see issues popping up and being worked on over the course of the week.

We have also been discussing our wonderful open source community and what we can do to improve it, and recognise those people who are putting in a lot of work. One of the ideas we've been discussing is having an official 'Core Team' who will get extra responsibilities as well as recognition, access to a weekly meeting and eventually meet-ups. We'll post more details about this soon.

In addition to this, we have come up with several desirable improvements to Slimer - our IRC bot. I have opened up a few issues on the Slimer repo related to this - a couple are assigned, but the rest are very much up for grabs and we'd also like to hear any more suggestions people have for ways to make Slimer more useful.

Moving on to what's going on in the world of Ghost this week - we've seen a lot of activity on Ember since last week's meeting, long may it continue! Additionally, during the meeting we decided that as there has been no further discussion on the Ember Models vs Ember Data issue that we're going to plump for Ember Data. It's used in all the Ember docs, and seems like the most sensible choice.

There are still plenty of issues open in the Ember milestone with more to come, please grab anything that catches your eye by dropping a comment on the issue. There's tonnes to do, and we really want to do the official switch over as soon as possible!

Warning: there will not be a dev meeting on Tuesday next week, but instead we will have a brief catchup meeting on Wednesday at the same time.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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.

Next week I will be travelling back from Egypt at the time we usually hold the meeting, so I will post an update blog post around the usual time, and we'll hold a shorter progress / catchup meeting on Wednesday at 5:30pm UK time instead of the normal Tuesday meeting.

This week's meeting kicked off a little differently - with a rough outline of the agenda for the meeting.

• Meeting starts with a progress update covering what has happened over the last week, and catching up with any issues that are outstanding.
• Next there is an opportunity for anyone to bring up anything they want to discuss - anything at all to do with Ghost development be it questions, comments, concerns etc.
• Lastly I wanted to run through the ember admin and discuss where we are with it.

The day after the last meeting, all outstanding Ember PRs were merged, and the ember branch was merged into master. Both the original and ember admin now live side by side in master, the original admin at /ghost/ and the new ember admin at /ghost/ember/.

The past week has seen a lot of activity on GitHub, it's been one of the most active weeks we've seen in a while, with a lot of people picking up bugs and small issues that popped up as we have merged so many API refactors and other bits and pieces. Hopefully, this activity will continue on into next week and become much more focused on Ember.

One issue that is still poking around from the API project is #2601 which is all about non-RESTful endpoints and how they should work. @steveklabnik, one of the co-authors of the JSON-API format joined us for the meeting to help us decide what to do. The JSON-API standard is almost ready to be released as 1.0, and there have been some interesting changes and improvements as people have started hacking on it, one of which is the option to move the request/response formats to use data as a consistent key rather than a plural resource name like posts.

We still have an open discussion on whether we should use Ember Model, Ember Data or something else. @jgable has done a spike on Ember-Data, and we'd love to see one turn up for Ember Model so that we can compare the two. Ideally, we want to make this decision this week so that we can crack on and turn the Ember admin into the admin!

During the meeting I walked through some aspects of the API and what is and isn't implemented, as well as some visual and behavioural issues with the new Ember admin. Since the meeting I've gone through and opened many new issues, several of which are marked with the beginner tag, as well as added comments or updates to many of the existing issues in the Ember project. Most of the issues are linked from the main Ember Epic, and there are quite a few more to open. Please feel free to grab any unassigned issues by dropping a comment on the issue, or letting me know in IRC.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 20th May, 5:30pm London time.

Today we are very pleased to welcome Sarah Frantz to the team as our newest Ghost Support Engineer!

Our first team member from the United States, Sarah describes herself as a perpetual geek and proud working mother. She'll be helping out users on Ghost(Pro), checking in on the Ghost forums, and crafting finely honed helpful words of wisdom in our support documentation.

That brings our Ghost Foundation Non-Profit team to 5, and counting!

Find her on Twitter, or read Sarah's blog!

Today we are officially switching over to focusing on [Ember]((https://github.com/TryGhost/Ghost/issues?milestone=17&state=open).

The API Project still has a number of issues outstanding. We're working on wrapping these up as quickly as we can. We've done quite a bit of refactoring, and a lot of what's left is mopping up, so it may take a few more days to get all the PRs in on top of one another.

While a few people carry on cleaning up and finishing off the last few bits of the API, it is time for us to switch our focus to Ember 100%. This will happen over the course of this week. The first task is to figure out what to do with the 4 open PRs, whether to merge them or hold them for now so that we can merge the ember branch into master.

There are a couple of big niggles with the Ember project at the moment, most notably, how we plan to access the API and deal with the data. We need to make sure that we have a clear plan for this. It's being discussed in #2699 and the outcome of the discussion should be a clear plan / process documented on the Ember wiki doc.

The next steps will be to get the Ember admin UI up to enough of a standard that we can delete the old admin. In order to do this, we need to have ported the majority of the functionality including all the minute details of behaviour that may otherwise be lost. There are many open issues and we will continue to improve visibility on where we are as the week goes on.

Tips for working on Ember:

The issue list lives on the Ember.js milestone, and there is an epic issue which is a good place to start looking to get an idea of what this project involves. The majority of the issues currently open are blocks of functionality that need porting over from the old admin. Any issue which is directly to do with Ember, or 'Emberifying' something, is also marked with [Ember.js] at the start of the title, so that people only interested in Ember issues can filter GitHub notifications from Ghost.

Currently, the Ember.js version of the admin lives on the ember branch on GitHub, on which there are two versions of the admin. The old admin still lives in its usual place at /ghost/ and the Ember.js version lives at /ghost/ember/. This week we will merge the ember branch into master, and delete it. At that point the two admins will still coexist, but on the main master branch. We hope to be able to remove the old admin and have only the new admin somewhere around the meeting after next (20th May).

Please keep an eye on the Ember wiki doc as we will continue to update that with relevant / useful info as we think of it.

If you have any questions, are interested in picking up some work or otherwise getting involved, please swing by our #ghost channel on freenode. We'd love to help you get started contributing to the Ember project. There will be a video chat, probably on Thursday 15th of May for anyone looking for some guidance on getting started - more details next week.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 13th May, 5:30pm London time.

Yesterday's meeting was a year to the day that we launched the Kickstarter campaign. Here's the second ever commit to the GitHub repo, which happened during the KS campaign after a week or so of cleaning up the prototype into a state fit for other developers...just about. We've come a long way in a year, and are very grateful to all of our contributors past, present and future for all of their time and hard work helping us to deliver Ghost.

Our API project has been progressing over the last week, and will hopefully be wrapping up this week - I have asked for all PRs to be submitted by Friday, and anyone who has an issue they cannot get completed by then needs to let us know. We'll use the weekend to test, merge and clean up loose ends. The API will be marked as v0.2 to indicate the progress & we'll ensure we have full documentation.

During the upcoming projects - Ember, Multi-user and Apps, the API will continue to evolve to meet our needs. One major evolution will be the addition of OAuth to Ghost for authenticating between the Admin UI and Ghost itself. With this addition, we will also add OAuth for the API, bump the API to v1, publish the documentation and declare the API ready for public use.

In next week's meeting we will be kicking off the Ember project into full swing. If you're interested in getting involved please come to the meeting, or if you can't make it drop in IRC sometime and let us know you're around and interested!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode (note that the UK has just moved onto Daylight Savings Time, so the meeting is an hour earlier than it was previously). 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 6th May, 5:30pm London time.

My stomach lurched, one final time, as I stared at the draft Kickstarter Campaign on the screen before me. I scrolled up and down the project description vigorously, checking that everything was there. Pictures, check. Rewards, check. FAQs, done. Six months of preparation came down to this moment. Six months of trepidation stored up to be released with one final click of the mouse.

It was April 29th, 2013.

Click

It feels like both a few moments and a lifetime ago when Ghost first announced itself publicly to the world. The amount that we’ve accomplished in the last 12 months is nothing short of staggering, and yet there is so much more that remains to be done. But on this, our first anniversary, I’d like to take a moment to share some of our journey with you — as well as some of our plans for what’s coming next.

We know, now, that we have created something which people want. Beyond that, we know that we have created something which genuinely has a positive impact on the world. Open Source, Not for Profit, Distributed… Ghost has the startup diversity trifecta locked up. It doesn’t make things easier — one might go as far as to say that it makes everything significantly harder — but it gives us something very powerful to believe in and work towards. The value of that cannot be overstated.

The Story So Far

Since Ghost launched to the public 6 months ago, we’ve seen 160,000 people sign up for an account on Ghost.org, who generate well over 1million page views per month and have cumulatively downloaded Ghost 272,000 times.

The Ghost core GitHub repository has had 2,150 code commits from 125 contributing developers all over the world. It has been starred 10,250 times — making it the 38th most popular project of all time on GitHub. Just behind LESS, and ahead of Ember.js. (Want to get involved?)

Since our Ghost(Pro) service launched just 4 months ago, we’ve grown to a paying user base of 2,300 customers generating slightly over $175,000 in annual recurring revenue — growing at roughly 30% month on month. That last stat is arguably the most important, as it secures the long term future of Ghost.

We are now a full-time team of 5 and, as a non-profit, we aren’t able to take Venture Capital as would be the norm for a tech startup (though many have contacted us to try, all the same). In order for Ghost to continue to evolve and develop, we’re relying on growing slowly and organically. Much like the first iteration of Ghost was made possible by our users via Kickstarter — the future of Ghost is made possible by our users on Ghost(Pro).

A very small number of paying users are making free, open source publishing possible for millions of people all over the world for the foreseeable future. That’s pretty incredible.

What’s Coming Next

In the original Kickstarter video, I laid out my idea for what a new and exciting blogging platform could look like. The ideas which I described could be considered the vision and goals for version 1.0 of Ghost. Now six months since public release, we are about half way there. Ghost is currently at version 0.4 (fast approaching 0.5) and our progress is relentless. Here are just some of the things you can expect to see us working on and releasing for the rest of the year:

• A brand new, polished API which massively opens up the potential for developers to build on top of Ghost.
• A significantly faster and slicker admin interface with much better mobile support.
• Multiple-user support in Ghost (finally!)
• One-click upgrades, to make it even easier to always stay up to date. (Unless you use Ghost(Pro), in which case you're already upgraded automatically).
• Apps support, to allow 3rd party products, extensions and integrations to be built on top of Ghost.
• Better imports, to make migrating from other platforms easier.
• Localisation, to support running Ghost in different languages.
• The long-awaited Ghost Dashboard, bringing your blog’s data to life in a centralised, useful admin home screen.

We’re also working on massive improvements to Ghost.org all the time. Very soon you’ll be seeing a fresh, slick Ghost(Pro) dashboard, significantly improved and expanded user documentation, and small but important improvements in user experience all over the site.

The Start of Year 2

There is little doubt in my mind that the second year is going to be even tougher than the first. We have set the expectations high, and we have asked our users to trust us. It is our responsibility, now, not just to build features and fix bugs — but to create an experience so immersive and direct that it enables the user to think and create in a way not previously possible.

Every tool in the history of time has impacted upon that which it was used to create, and it is the development of tools which separates us as humans from every other species. When looked at from that perspective, Ghost has the potential to be far more than just a blogging platform.

We have an incredible privilege, position and opportunity to influence the future of how ideas and stories are created and shared all over the world. Not just status updates or cat photos, but real, lasting, important content. Content which is owned by you, rather than any single company or social network. Ideas which are worth debating. Stories which are distributed and democratised by the masses.

Much like the internet itself: This is for everyone.

Today's meeting was mostly a progress report for the API project. Our new-found focus this week has resulted in a lot more commits, including several from new contributors which is fantastic. We are still looking to get more people involved and continue to try to create beginner level issues to facilitate this.

There are still a considerable number of API issues outstanding, although the vast majority of them are in progress by a developer. This week should see a flurry of PR activity! There are still some issues to be raised, so if you're still looking to get involved, keep an eye on the API backlog.

The structure of error responses from the API is an important consideration, and one that has not yet been addressed. We discussed this in some detail during the meeting, and an issue will be raised shortly to continue the discussion.

The remainder of the meeting was spent getting progress updates on the API issues which were assigned last week, and assigning more issues to developers. It's great to see some new names popping up to claim issues :) If you're interested in getting involved, please visit our IRC channel, come along to meetings, and don't be shy.

Next week we will do a full review of the API project, as well as plan another informal Google hangout for contributors.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode (note that the UK has just moved onto Daylight Savings Time, so the meeting is an hour earlier than it was previously). 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 29th April, 5:30pm London time.

This week, we have shaken things up. For the past few weeks the focus of the team has been split between Ember, Apps and the API. We don't have a big enough team for so many big projects!

From now on, we want to switch our focus from big milestones to small (no more than 4 weeks), individual projects and getting everyone working together on one thing at a time. In this way, I believe we'll be able to focus our resources and deliver more.

The Roadmap has been overhauled, with us focusing on the API project first, as it is a dependency for everything else. This will be followed by the Ember.js project, and then Multi-user so that we can deliver something big to our users. This is as much as we have planned at present, as time goes on we'll see if this approach works, and schedule in more projects based on what people are asking for, and what the dependencies are.

There is more detail on the Roadmap page, which is constantly updated with more information as and when the plan becomes clear.

Master is NOT stable

There was a lengthly discussion during the meeting about the use of the master branch.

Noone should be running a live blog with data they care about on the master branch.

It is not a stable branch: this doesn't just mean there could be bugs, it means that you could get your data into a state from which it cannot be migrated, or you could end up unable to edit your blog. If you want to run Ghost from git, either use a release tag or the stable branch.

In order to be absolutely clear about this, we're going to add a warning message to one of the grunt tasks, so that anyone trying to build Ghost from master is reminded not to use this for a live blog.

Core Developer Hangout

We're going to start running Google+ hangouts for core developers. The first one will be 6:30pm London time on Thursday 17th April. The hangout will be posted to IRC.

We'll aim to do these every 2 weeks or so, at different times to give different people the opportunity to join.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode (note that the UK has just moved onto Daylight Savings Time, so the meeting is an hour earlier than it was previously). 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 22nd April, 5:30pm London time.

Last week we set out three things as core focus points for the week:

• Tests - get these passing reliably again
• Ember.js - get both notifications and modals in place
• The API - get the issues for this sorted out

We've made some serious progress on improving the tests, most of the random failures are now resolved. There are still a few in the pg build which is going to be looked at this week.

Modals have landed in the ember branch, notifications are in a PR which is almost ready to merge. Elsewhere in ember-land there has been much progress and with modals and notifications many features can be built out. The main blocker now is having a full fake API for the ember branch to work against. This will be a core focus this week.

Progress with the API hasn't been quite so smooth. Last week we were in a position where a decision had been made on how to proceed, and we just needed to divide it up into a set of issues to get it into the pipeline. However, that was turned on its head by me having second thoughts about the JSON-API standard and what it means for Ghost.

I feel very strongly that in our case, consistency between the different ways of consuming the API is more important than potential performance improvements that can be achieved by using linked objects instead of inline objects. During the meeting, this was the consensus - that we should continue to work towards supporting the JSON API standard, but keep our objects inline, and later on add an option for linked objects.

One result of the change towards following JSON API is that the pagination object which is currently created and given to themes will be renamed meta. This will not affect the pagination helper, but will affect any themes using the pagination object directly (I know of none, if you're doing this, please get in touch). pagination will be deprecated for 2 releases before it is removed.

In the world of Apps, much progress has been made in the last week, however the majority of that progress is living out on the apps-perms branch. This branch contains all of the data models & new permissions code needed to deliver apps in a safe way. The next step is to create a set of test cases to verify that what we have is correct, and merge in this branch after next weeks meeting unless there are problems.

This week's focus points:

• Ember.js - ensure the mock API is complete with lots of data & start looking at how we might use models in future.
• API - get issues opened for migrating the format & ensuring consistency
• Apps - get everyone working towards their own example app & helping define the missing GDK APIs

The big focus for the core team this week is to get building the fundamentals of a series of apps. We want to use this to inspire tests and use cases for different apps, collaborate on a set of wiki pages around missing GDK Apis (routing, assets, etc) and to put together a series of issues to move these forward. Next weeks meeting will focus on how to deliver various parts of the GDK.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode (note that the UK has just moved onto Daylight Savings Time, so the meeting is an hour earlier than it was previously). 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 15th April, 5:30pm London time.

The past week has been pretty quiet, with the small exception of the release of 0.4.2 of course!

As always, I am incredibly grateful to every single person who contributed:

Fabian Becker, John O'Nolan, Harry Wolff, Sebastian Gierlinger, Gabor Javorszky, Jacob Gable, Johan Stenehall, Kyle Nunery, mattse, Brad Dougherty, Jakob Gillich, Jonathan Johnson, Michael Bradshaw, Paul Adam Davis, Sam Saccone, Shashank Mehta, Aia Patag, Andy, Clinton Ryan, Dan Schnau, Dane Springmeyer, Daniel Niccoli, Declan Cook, Garrett Murphey, Jason Williams, John-David Dalton, Kenny Meyer, Lucas Churchill, Manuel Mitasch, Mark Stacey, Rob Graeber, Sean Hellwig, Xie JinBin, Zach Geis, balduv, cobbspur, nicksahler, polygonix, redwallhp

Releases are always time consuming, and putting our code in front of so many people inevitably turns up the odd issue or two. With the release of 0.4.2 we have encountered a problem with some themes which were not setup to correctly handle tag linking. This was not considered as a potentially breaking change by us, and so we spent some time discussing how we should manage this in future.

With Ghost being pre 1.0 and pretty fast-moving, there is a certain amount of expectation that things will break. However, we do believe we can improve the visibility and communication around potential breakage by allowing themes to determine which version of Ghost it should work with. This way we can do all sorts of interesting things around upgrading and informing users.

This week, we have 3 core points of focus:

• Tests - get these passing reliably again
• Ember.js - get both notifications and modals in place
• The API - get the issues for this sorted out

We're hoping to churn out some more issues tagged beginner over the next week to try to help more people get involved.

Also this week I added a new branch to Ghost's GitHub. The stable branch is intended to contain the latest release of Ghost for anyone installing or buidling packages from git, so that it is easier to keep up to date. I'm interested to hear from anyone who might use this as to whether it would be useful to commit the built assets on this branch?

Don't forget that there is now a podcast about Ghost. Check out recent episodes of Ghostalk for some particularly interesting insights from Kezz Bracey of Polygonix themes, Andy Boutte and David Balderston from allaboutghost.com and this week Julian Lam of NodeBB :)

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode (note that the UK has just moved onto Daylight Savings Time, so the meeting is an hour earlier than it was previously). 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 8th April, 5:30pm London time.

Today, we're announcing Ghost 0.4.2 - which is a maintenance release.

Traditionally in a maintenance release the only changes are essential bugfixes. But... Pre-1.0 some flexibility is common to allow for a fast pace of development. So today's release contains a little bit more than you might be expecting!

• [New] Support for editing on touch screen devices!
• [New] Tag archive support!
• [New] Custom page template support!
• [New] Default robots.txt which can be overridden by themes
• [New] RPC ping when new posts are published
• [New] Themes can now have a package.json
• [New] Ghost is now an NPM module
• [New] Bower now manages front end dependencies
• Lots more

How to Upgrade

Snap! Ghost(Pro) users have already been upgraded. You're welcome.

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.4.2 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on Github.

Enjoy!

This week has largely been focused on testing and fixing bugs in 0.4.2. A second release candidate was made available today, and the release pushed back by a day due to an RC1 bug that was deemed to be a blocker. If all goes well, the release will begin around 10am tomorrow - this includes updating everyone on Ghost(Pro).

This week we have an awesome announcement: Paul Adam Davis has joined Ghost. More info on this over on the Ghost Blog.

The Ember rewrite has become somewhat blocked on modals and notifications. We're looking to resolve this during the coming week, in order to get the rewrite off the ground. At this point the aim is to get a to a rough version 1 which may not have everything perfect but so that we can at least see where all the pieces fit.

The API and permissions work is on-going. We're now about ready to start the work of switching over bits of the API to support the new JSON-API-style format, upgrading those parts to 0.2 as we go. At some point once we decide the API is 'ready' we'll then switch the whole API over to version 1.

Work on Ember, the API and Apps should all kick into higher gear this week once the 0.4.2 release is done. In the next meeting we'll revist the 0.5 milestone in more detail and look at how to deliver it in a timely manner alongside the Ember rewrite.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 1st April, 5:30pm London time.

We're very proud to welcome Paul Davis to the small (but growing!) Ghost team as our new Front-End architect / rocket scientist / neurosurgeon / ok fine I'll stop.

Based in the UK, Paul likes to get deep and meaningful with SASS, CSS, HTML and front-end JavaScript. He also gets deep and meaningful with his BMW, which he loves more than cake.

Paul is going to be heading up a big part of the front-end efforts both on Ghost itself, as well as right here on Ghost.org.

Find him on GitHub and Twitter!

There's an exciting release just around the corner - Ghost 0.4.2 is scheduled for release this week - likely the 25th March.

Usually, patch releases contain little more than a few bug fixes and refactors, but in this case, we're taking advantage of being pre 1.0 and pushing out some serious features in 0.4.2. The majority of these features will impact on theme and other developers.

New features

package.json

Ghost themes now support having a package.json file. At the bare minimum, this file needs to contain a name and version number, which will be used in the Ghost admin theme dropdown. This file is not required in Ghost 0.4.2, but will likely be required in a future version.

Here's the example package.json from Casper:

{
  "name": "Casper",
  "version": "0.9.3"
}

You can choose to add any other fields to your package.json, the npm docs detail several options such as description, keywords, homepage and repository. As Ghost develops we'll make more and more use of these fields both in Ghost and on our marketplace. In addition, very soon Ghost will allow you to add the version of Ghost which your theme supports/requires and will have internal tools to ensure that themes are compatible and help managing upgrades.

The {{log}} helper

Handlebars supports the use of a log helper, but until now this hasn't done anything useful in Ghost. Now, when you're running Ghost in development mode you can use {{log}} to output debug messages to the server console. Perhaps the most interesting example of this is using {{log this}} to output the current handlebars context.

Tag Pages

Perhaps the single most exciting addition in 0.4.2, is the long awaited tag pages feature. Tag pages contain a paginated lists of posts which have a particular tag. If you use the default {{tags}} helper in your theme, tags will now automatically link to their tag page.

If you're not using the {{tags}} helper you'll probably want to update your theme to wrap tags in <a href="{{url}}"></a> to take advantage of this new feature.

In addition to the updated helpers, you can also add a tag.hbs file to your theme. This template will be used to render tag pages, so it's possible to control exactly how these look. Tag pages use the index.hbs file by default if no tag.hbs file can be found.

Custom Page Templates

As well as the shiny new tag.hbs template, Ghost now also supports custom templates for your individual pages giving you tight control over exactly how your static pages render. If you have a special page on your blog called 'About' with the url /about/, you can create a template called page-about.hbs with a custom layout and this template will only be used to render the About page, and nothing else.

The {{#has}} helper

The brand new {{#has}} helper has been created to provide a bit more flexibility in creating different layouts for posts in Ghost. The overall goal of the has helper is to allow you to ask questions about what the current context looks like. For the time being this only covers determining which tags are present, here's an example:

{{#post}}
    {{#has tag="photo"}}
        ...do something if this post has a tag of photo...
    {{else}}
        ...do something if this posts doesn't have a tag of photo...
    {{/has}}
{{/post}}

Furthermore, the has helper will accept a comma separated list of tags so that you can ask if a post has any one of a list of tags a.k.a an 'or' query. For example, if a post has a tag of photo or video or audio:

{{#has tag="photo, video, audio"}}
...do something if this post has a tag of photo or video or audio...
{{else}}
...do something with other posts...
{{/has}}

We hope that these new features give theme developers a better idea of just how powerful the Ghost theming system can become. We're super excited about all the features that are yet to come, and are committed to continuously and incrementally adding theme features with each and every Ghost release.

Changes

pageUrl -> page_url

In 0.4.2 we've renamed all of our helpers to consistently use underscores rather than camelCase. The majority of this affected internal helpers, but the pageUrl helper (used in custom pagination.hbs templates) also needed changing. To prevent compatibility problems, we've kept the old pageUrl helper around, but deprecated it in favour of page_url. Using pageUrl will result in a deprecation warning.

pageUrl will be removed in a future release of Ghost (likely 0.6 to make sure there is plenty of overlap), so theme developers are encouraged to make the switch shortly after 0.4.2 is released.

{{tags}} helper supports HTML prefix & suffix

The {{tags}} helper has been modified to permit the use of HTML in the prefix and suffix attributes, as well as the separator attribute, allowing for more flexibility in customising tag output without having to breakout from using the {{tags}} helper.

Active discussions

I believe it is very important that theme developers are actively involved in decision making around the theme API. We try as much as possible to provide an opportunity for discussion and debate around new features, so that we can build the best toolset possible. The following are some currently open theme API discussions that you may wish to get involved in:

• Have an option 'append' to the content helper: #2163
• [Feature] Improved post excerpts / previews
  #2166
  
• body_class overhaul
  #1967
  
• Improve handlebars' ability to be context aware
  #2249
  

A cheeky request

I'm over the moon that so many theme developers are offering fantastic themes for free, and many of those are being openly maintained on GitHub. I cannot begin to explain how happy seeing Ghost themes on GitHub makes me! However, I'd like to ask all theme developers using this mechanism to provide a clear link at the top of the readme which downloads a version of the theme which is compatible with the currently released version of Ghost.

I ask this because some of you are super-proactive, and update your themes for the next version of Ghost before it is released. As we start to introduce backwards in-compatible changes, we're getting a few people trying to use those new versions of your themes and getting confused. Unfortunately, what tends to happen in these cases is the user switches away to another theme... not what you want at all!

The release candidate for 0.4.2 is now available and ready for testing. We appreciate as many people as possible grabbing the RC and taking it for a spin so that we can iron out any kinks. We have a special issue open for tracking testing.

You can download the pre-built zip file from the green button on the release page. This is a ready-to-go version of Ghost that doesn't require any building or grunting. A simple download, unzip and npm install --production && npm start should get you up and running.

For the first time ever, this version of Ghost is also available via npm. If you're interested in how you can use Ghost this way, check out the documentation (still a work in progress).

Full details of what is included in release 0.4.2, along with a detailed blog post covering what this release means for theme developers will be made available shortly :)

There were two main points on the agenda for this week's meeting:

• Shipping 0.4.2
• Ember.js rewrite

0.4.2

We are about to release master as 0.4.2. The deadline for PRs was Monday, and now we are in the process of merging, testing, cleaning up and getting a release candidate ready. 0.4.2 has some awesome features, including tag pages, and will be the first version of Ghost published to npm.

There are a couple of issues which still have some work outstanding. #2312 I have not yet PR'd as the fix is pretty ugly and it seems more appropriate at this stage to run a temporary showdown fork. #2148 needs a little cleanup work, and #2149 is still open as there is potential for futher improvements. All of this should be sorted out over the next day or so and the 0.4.2 RC should land on Thursday 20th, final release should be Tuesday 25th.

Ember.js rewrite

This week, @hswolff made significant headway with scaffolding the app - all the screens now exist in some form. There are ~20 new issues that have been opened and are mostly ready to start on.

For anyone who is unfamiliar with the Ember rewrite, it lives on the ember branch. This branch has the old admin located in it's usual place at /ghost/ and the new ember admin located at /ghost/ember/ so that anyone joining in but new to Ghost development can reference the old admin. When switching to the ember branch, we recommend running grunt clean && grunt init && grunt dev to get up and running (we should probably make a shorthand for this).

There are a couple of blockers to work on the Ember rewrite, the biggest of which being the discussion around the divide between what should live in Ember and what should live in Ghost-UI - Ghost's bootstrap-like frontend framework. I've raised issue #2446 to continue this discussion, and welcome all to get involved.

Aside from this, there is also some work needed to get fixtures sorted out (#2415), which in part depends upon the work we are doing to redesign the API following the JSON API standard as closely as possible. The API redesign & refactor is also pivotal to delivering Apps, so we are looking to get more people involved with this - if you like APIs come give us a hand :)

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 25th March, 5:30pm London time.

Time and time again, there are two things which consistently cause difficulty for blog users: Getting pages to load as fast as possible for visitors (and search engines) all over the world - and protecting work against attacks from malicious sources when a site becomes popular.

Today we are thrilled to announce an official partnership between Ghost(Pro) and the incredible team over at CloudFlare.

So what is CloudFlare?

CloudFlare makes it easy for any site to be as fast and secure as the Internet giants. We’ll make any website twice as fast and protect it from a broad range of web threats. CloudFlare is designed to take a great hosted service like Ghost.org's and make it even better.

How does that work? I'm glad you asked! In short, CloudFlare distributes your content across its network of 24 worldwide data centers. This means that there's the shortest possible distance between your data and your reader - which makes things much quicker all round.

In addition to the speed increase, CloudFlare actively protects your blog against attacks such as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), hacking and malicious use of web forms.

Faster, safer, better. It's pretty cool.

And how much do I have to pay for all this extra stuff now?

Nothing. It's free for every single Ghost(Pro) user. Over the next few weeks it will be automatically enabled on your blog, so you don't need to do anything at all. It just works! Like a tiger riding a unicorn with 4 litres of Red Bull and a sword. Fearsome.

Enjoy your (even) faster blog!

This week we made 3 pretty big infrastructural changes - 1. we switched JSLint for JSHint so that we can use ES6 modules, 2. we added bower for managing our frontend dependencies and 3. we removed all Sass from the Ghost repository, instead pulling in a pre-built css css file & fonts from the Ghost-UI repository and removing Ghost's dependency on ruby in the process.

The Ember.js project is moving forward, with the prototype now merged into the Ember branch. This week we are going to focus on getting a mock API in place to develop against and get the project moving full steam ahead. @hswolff is acting as our 'Ember Envoy' and is the main point of contact for this project.

Work on the real API & permissions continues for Apps on the 003-data-updates branch. This branch is going to continue on for a little longer, as we are going to release master as the next version of Ghost shortly. I've setup Milestone 0.4.2 which closes on the 17th, this contains all the work on 0.5 so far, a few things which are in progress and a couple of bugs. If all goes to plan, this will be released as Ghost 0.4.2 on the 25th of March. More info on what's in the release will be published soon!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 18th March, 5:30pm London time.

It is with MUCH excitement that I write this post to declare that building Ghost no longer depends on ruby.

That's right, you no longer have to have both node AND ruby on your development box to build or deploy Ghost. No more Gem files, no more bundler, no more bourbon. We don't have to wait for Travis to do ruby things, Gemnasium is no longer utterly confused and using tools like Werker is now straight forward. The PR removed so much complexity, you might even want to look at it, you know, in awe and stuff.

Why were you using ruby anyway?

Ghost's admin UI is written with Sass, and the ruby Sass compiler is the default. We tried to switch to node-sass (we really did), but the libsass C library it uses to compile is unfortunately missing too many features which we require. Therefore we were stuck with requiring ruby.

So how did you get rid of it?

Ghost has now split out the Sass for its admin UI into a frontend framework over at Ghost-UI. Much the same as Twitter Bootstrap, that repository generates a set of CSS files, fonts, and soon JS files that allow you to easily create simple UI components like buttons and tabs in the Ghost UI style. The framework is also open source, and if you're a frontend dev wanting to contribute to Ghost - it's the place to be (but you will still need ruby).

This week we made another important change to the Ghost infrastructure - we added Bower to manage our frontend dependencies. This means that we can pull in the Ghost-UI files using bower and a grunt task to put the files in the right place. It also means that the Ghost codebase has significantly reduced in size this week which we hope will help make it easier for new developers to navigate.

If you're a frontend dev looking to work on Ghost-UI alongside Ghost, and wondering how to make it possible to work with them both without having to publish to Bower, I highly recommend having a read of Thomas Parisot's Bower link tutorial. For everyone who just wants to work on Ghost core, or build Ghost from source, this is an important step forward. Excite!

The three most common questions we get about our Ghost(Pro) service are "What is a view? How do you count them? And what happens when I go over the views in my plan?" - Today, we'd like to give you some answers.

We count a "view" as a each time a page loaded and someone views it. In most analytics programs this is referred to as a "pageview". If someone visits your site and looks at 1 page, that's 1 view. If they click on related links and read 5 different consecutive posts on your blog, that's 5 views.

How do we measure "views" ?

How views are measured is very important to us, because views determine what plan you should be on, and how much you are billed.

Initially, we tried a simple approach where we counted views based on requests to the server. Unfortunately this was far from ideal, as we found that when compared to a standard tool like Google Analytics - our view count was about 300% higher. Because of this, we haven't enforced any plan limits based on views up until now, to make sure that nobody gets billed for more views than they really received.

So we went back to our cauldron to whip up something new.

Our goal is always to make sure that we report a view count which is the same or lower than a standard analytics tracking service so that you are always billed fairly and accurately.

Today we're announcing the new Ghost(Pro) viewcounter which is a big improvement all round on our initial attempts.

How it works

To get an accurate count, we want to make sure that we only count a view when an entire page has been fully loaded. In order to track this, we insert a 1 pixel image file called view.gif at the very end of your blog's source code. When this file is loaded, it counts it as a view and tracks which page has been viewed.

<img src="/view.gif?page=/about-me" alt="" style="display:none" hidden />

This image is completely invisible and hidden, so it never shows up on your blog. It just counts views in the background and nothing else.

We count each view received by this file, and then we reduce your total viewcount by 5%. So if you receive 100 views, we count 95.

Why? Because we want to be certain that we report a view count the same as, or less than, a standard analytics tool. You may occassionally be billed too little for your usage, but you should never be billed too much.

How many views did I get?

In order to keep track of how many views your blog has been getting, we've created a viewcounter which will appear on your blog management screen on Ghost.org. It looks like this:

This counter tells you how many views you've used in the current billing period out of your plan's allowance. It also has a small black chiclet to indicate how many days are left until your view count will reset and begin the next billing period.

If the black chiclet is ahead of the green bar, you're probably on the right plan. If you find that the view meter is filling up faster than the black chiclet is moving, that's a good indication that you're probably going to run out of views before the end of the month!

What happens if I get a lot of views and go over my limit?

First, we try to let you know before this happens. Every day, the Ghost(Pro) systems check for blogs that are getting close to their view limit for the month. If you've used more than 80% of your views, we send you an email to let you know in advance.

As soon as we notice that you've exceeded your limit for the month, we send you another email to tell you, and from this point you have a grace period of 3 full days to upgrade your Ghost(Pro) plan.

So, if you're right on the limit, and you run out of views just 2 days before your viewcount is due to reset - you don't need to worry about upgrading. Your view count will reset by itself.

If 3 full days have gone by and you still haven't upgraded your account to a higher plan or come to the end of your billing period, we will temporarily suspend your account until you are able to upgrade it. We send you an email when this happens, too, so you're always in the loop.

When will this be starting?

We're planning to start the rollout of the new viewcounter across all (Pro) accounts over the next few days. Today, we just wanted to let you know in advance what's happening and how it works.

Everyone's view counts will be starting from zero. No nasty surprises.

If you have any questions about how this works, please let us know in the comments below and we'll do our best to answer all of them!

By the way: Our viewcounter is only intended to track basic usage as it relates to your Ghost(Pro) plan. If you want full data on your blog traffic, we recommend installing a 3rd party analytics system in your theme. Google Analytics, GoSquared and Piwik, are 3 of our faves.

Awesome cauldron photo from Flickr: 64790426@N03

Today I'm excited to share a momentous realisation we've come to at Ghost HQ.

We have suspected this for a while (I must admit) but recently we have been able to confirm, beyond reasonable doubt, that it turns out "The Ghost.org Official Hosted Platform / Service / Thing" - actually isn't a very catchy or memorable name.

So, we're renaming it...

But Seriously Why The Change?

There are several reasons. I'd like to share the most important of them with you.

For clarity - We've had a hard time (and so have many of you) distinguishing between the open source project and the official hosted platform in conversation. This new name should hopefully remove some confusion, and make it easier for everyone to stay on the same page.

Ghost = The software.
(Pro) = The official hosted service.

For marketing - We are a non-profit organisation called the Ghost Foundation and Ghost(Pro) is our only source of income. For Ghost to continue to exist and grow, we need to market our service effectively to new users. Ghost(Pro) subscribers are the people who finance the ongoing development and improvement of the Ghost software for the entire world (Thank you!).

For science - Studies suggest that 3 letters are easier to remember than [more than 3 letters]. We want you to remember Ghost(Pro).

So, that's it. Over the course of the next few days we'll be updating some naming and slowly rolling this out across Ghost.org. There are no other changes to any existing Ghost(Pro) plans. It's just a new name.

PS. Want to actively support Ghost and help us improve the software? Plans start at just $5 a month, and we'd be crazy not to remind you that you can try out Ghost(Pro) completely free right here.

How on earth is it March already? Time flies when you're having fun!

Development efforts are currently split between the Ember and Apps projects, however both of them are quite slow-going due to complex dependencies:

• Ember - we are in the process of setting up a new branch with all the tooling we need to build the Ember.js version of the admin UI.
• Apps - we're working through large data model, permissions and api issues which are heavy going.

The ember branch should be ready in the next few days, and the 003-data-updates branch will hopefully also be finished with this week. There is likely to be a flood of new issues in the coming days, one set to get the work on the Ember.js rewrite going, and another set to start adding filters to Ghost so that App development can properly get under way. In next week's meeting we will look at prioritising the projects.

For those of you interested solely in working on the Ember.js re-write, there is an Ember.js milestone where you can see all the active issues. Additionally, all issues relating to Ember.js have [Ember.js] in the title, so you should be able to watch the Ghost repository, and filter those issues to keep the noise down.

During the meeting we also discussed adding a concept of actions - events or notifications of actions which occur in Ghost which are 'fire and forget', unlike filters, there is now an issue to continue that discussion. Additionally, we need to re-start the discussion around assets from the perspective of apps. We'd love to get more ideas added to the App Ideas page, and PRs to the Example Apps repository are also very welcome.

Code Reviewing PRs

I'd like to encourage everyone - be you a lurker, a regular contributor, or somewhere in between - to review PRs and leave feedback. It's really useful to know if anyone else has read through the code or taken a PR for a spin. It's really easy to setup git so that you can checkout a PR like a branch, just follow these instructions: https://gist.github.com/piscisaureus/3342247

Weekly Email Digest

If you receive notification of these blog posts through the email subscription, we have moved it from sending a weekly digest on Mondays to Wednesdays. This way you'll get the email the day after the meeting, rather than the day before, keeping you more up to date. Apologies for the extra email this week. If you aren't subscribed and would like to be, you can do so via the green box on http://dev.ghost.org/.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 11th March, 5:30pm London time.

There are a few names in the web community which pop up time and time again in the historical records. People who have been responsible for great change in the technological, the business and the social aspects of the web. One name that many (if not most) will recognise, is Jeff Atwood; co-founder of Stack Overflow, and now - his new project - Discourse.

What is perhaps a little less known, however, is that it all began with a single blog.

A decade ago, in 2005, Jeff Atwood was a full time computer programmer for a small Microsoft consulting firm called Vertigo Software. He had gotten the job, in part, due to the growing popularity of his new blog - a little website called Coding Horror. The CEO loved his blog, and Jeff enjoyed writing it, so he was able to continue to do that on an ongoing basis.

Back in 2005 there were significantly less programming blogs in the world than there are today. It didn't take Coding Horror very long to go from a readership of a few people to a readership of a few thousand people. Jeff describes it as incredibly motivating, and something which he really wanted to find a productive way of engaging with.

For the next 4 years, Coding Horror went from strength to strength until one day in 2008 when Jeff met one of his readers for the first time. His name was Joel Spolsky. Coding Horror had now gotten to the point where the blog had grown so large and so fast, that Jeff was looking for an opportunity to put his ever-growing audience to positive use.

In his own words...

I'd reached the point where I was thinking that this is the most significant thing I've ever done. I can go to work and talk to 20 people in a day, or I can post on my blog and reach a hundred thousand people every day. Which makes more sense? So the question becomes what do you want to do? What do you do with this big ball of energy which has the potential to change the world in some way?

So Jeff started reaching out to people for ideas for what to do. He talked to several people who he thought were interesting, but Joel Spolsky, who he'd met just the once, had the best idea. He had seen a website called Experts Exchange and he believed it could be improved and specifically targeted towards programmers.

As the pair set to work on their idea for a new Q&A site which would really work, Jeff took to his blog to ask his readers for help with naming it. In April of 2008, Coding Horror readers voted, by overwhelming majority, that 'Stack Overflow' was by far the strongest candidate. A few weeks later, the new site was announced.

They described the difference between StackOverflow and its competitors as simply taking existing ideas and combing them to create something new that really worked.

For a long time it was just Jeff and 2 developers working away quietly and talking to Joel once a week on the phone. Jeff continued to blog on Coding Horror, and they set up a new blog on Stack Overflow took the format of a podcast of their weekly phonecalls. In episode 1, Jeff and Joel sit down to discuss everything they wanted (and hoped) StackOverflow would be. It's an amazing throwback to listen to now.

The rest, as they say, is history.

In 2010 Joel moved into the official role of CEO and the company took a Series A of $6M followed by a $12M Series B just two years later. Today, Stack Overflow receives an average of 18million page views per day and has become the destination of just about every programmer in the world, the second there's a problem which they need some help with.

It's incredible to read stories like this which all began with just a blog. A ball of energy and potential which, when harnessed, really can go on to do large and incredible things.

Nowadays Jeff has moved on to his new project: Discourse, which is the Ghost of online forum software, if you will. (In fact the Discourse project was where the "Free. Open. Simple." tagline originated, which Ghost has also adopted.) And Jeff still looks back fondly on the humble blog:

I think the blog is still very relevant. It's this way to connect with a very large audience, these people who are listening and paying attention to you. That's a privilege. I believe very strongly that you shouldn't squander that.

Today, we're very proud and excited to welcome Jeff Atwood to the family, as the Coding Horror blog begins its next decade of existence and influence, now published with Ghost.

Yesterday's meeting revolved heavily around our decision to use Ember.js as our framework of choice for rebuilding the admin UI. If you'd like to read more about this decision, check out our announcement post.

I would like to thank everyone who took the time to write one of the ~100 incredibly valuable and constructive comments on the discussion thread and particularly thank the people who took the time to write some demo code: @hswolff wrote an example of the post settings menu in Angular, @samccone and @brian-mann demonstrated how much better our Backbone code could be with Marionette, @petehunt showed how much easier it would be to build our settings page in React and @manuelmitasch wrote an ember demo of the Ghost admin UI that was also worked on by @Globegitter.

Over the next week or so, we'll start getting a branch ready to redevelop the admin in Ember. If you'd like to get up to speed with ember, you can try out the CodeSchool course (drop an email to corey@codeschool.com if you need it adding to your account). We've got several core team members and developers from ember willing to help us out, but we also want to get as many Ghost contributors, new and old, involved in the code re-write as possible.

Right now, we're not 100% sure whether we're going to down tools on Apps to focus on this, or focus on shipping Apps first. The two projects will likely run side by side for a little while until we have a clearer idea of how much work is involved. We will update the roadmap & publish details of any changes to the plan as and when we are certain.

As well as the exciting news of the switch over to ember, we have a few other updates from today's meeting:

Introducing Ghost UI

This week we started a new GitHub repository called Ghost UI. We're going to split out the UI - that is SASS and interaction based JS into this repo in the form of a heavily Bootstrap-inspired user interface framework. Ghost UI will contain SASS and JS, which will be built out into a single .css and .js file that will then be included in Ghost via bower.

The Ghost UI repository will also contain extensive documentation for the framework, it's components and the parts that make them up. The intension is to make it easier for designers and frontend developers to get involved with and contribute to the Ghost project. We believe we're the first OSS project of our kind to structure our development this way, and we really hope it will help to encourage more frontend contributions.

Ghostalk

A few of our contributors have started a Ghost podcast! The first episode of 'Ghostalk' featuring Fabian Becker, Gabor Javorszky and Nick Pfisterer is available on https://talk.ghost.io, it covers all the latest goings on in the world of Ghost Development, and is far more digestible than IRC logs!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 4th March, 5:30pm London time.

Today we are announcing that the Ghost Admin UI is going to be rebuilt in Ember.js.

For the past couple of weeks, there has been an epic discussion occuring on Ghost's GitHub. The idea is that we're looking to find the right tool with which to build the next iteration of the Ghost admin UI: the main options being Angular, Ember, React or Backbone + marionette etc. Our existing Backbone implementation has a number of problems, so we've been specifically looking for the tool that will best solve those problems:

• Is it client side? Is it server side? Is it dark side?
• Data binding
• Route/navigation/history management
• View management
• Fragile Code
• Lack of clarity & guidelines on how to approach common problems

The discussion around which tool we should adopt has been amazingly positive and open minded, and has provided a great deal of insight. There is no doubt that any one of the options discussed could do a great job of driving the Ghost admin UI. However, throughout the discussion, there was one tool which shone out as being the right choice for Ghost. That tool is Ember.js.

Ember.js stands out from the other choices because it is strongly opinionated. Although seen as a downside by some, for Ghost, this is exactly what we need. As a fast moving open source project, we don't want to spend time discussing and deciding on the best structure, designing a framework & creating documentation and guidelines so that new contributors can get up to speed. With Ember.js, the majority of decisions have been made, making it easy to get going, easy to knowledge share, and easy to onboard new developers.

There are many other reasons for Ghost to choose Ember.js. It solves all of the hairiest problems we've faced with routing, data binding and view management in a straight forward manner. The tight integration with handlebars is a great fit with Ghost's existing dependence on handlebars. The top-down, URL driven approach is also going to help us push the whole app down to the client side in a much more structured manner.

The involvement of the Ember.js community in our decision making process has also been a great plus. We owe a special thanks to Trek, Manuel, Markus, Stefan, Taras, Erik, Yehuda, Tom and everyone else from the Ember.js community who got involved. They've shown that they are a passionate bunch of people and they have been very keen to get stuck in. The importance of their willingness to help us quickly turn around a big re-write cannot be overlooked, but this is not the only reason we are keen to join them. Their community and their approach is one we would love to emulate in Ghost's community, we hope that by working with them, some of their awesomeness will rub off on us!

Our core team is extremely excited to get stuck in with the rewrite. There will be plenty of news and updates here and on GitHub as the project unfolds. If you want to get involved, the best way is to drop by our IRC channel: #ghost on Freenode. The more the merrier!

A couple of weeks ago our (now) friends over at Duedil received several thousand pounds worth of advertising for free in one of the UK's largest newspapers: The Guardian.

Not knowing, really, what to do with such advertising - they decided to just run a giant picture of Doge for a day, and give the rest away to small businesses who might benefit from some mainstream news exposure.

Joyfully for us, Ghost was one of the companies selected to receive part of the remaining advertising budget. So today we are gracing the Business and Finance section of The Guardian.

We thought we'd keep it clean and simple.

If you picked up a copy of The Guardian today - take a picture of yourself with the Ad and post a link in the comments. We'll give a 6-month free coupon for the Ghost Hosted Platform to the best photo!

Much thankyou.

In recent weeks I've seen a question popping up regularly:

If I've got some area in my default.hbs file, but I want it to contain information that changes depending on the post or page I'm viewing (for example meta data), can I do that and if so how?

The answer is yes, you can! It's also really quite straightforward, however the feature is hidden away in the depths of how Ghost works, and not (yet) covered by our documentation. The following examples hope to demonstrate common Ghost-specific use cases and how to achieve them.

There is a feature of express-hbs called content blocks. This will allow you to define a placeholder block in a layout file (e.g. default.hbs), and then define the content for that block in a template file (e.g. post.hbs). A common example of this is wanting to set Open Graph and other meta tags for posts:

In default.hbs:

<head>
    {{{block "metaTags"}}}
</head>

In post.hbs:

{{#post}}
    {{#contentFor "metaTags"}}
        <meta property="og:title" content="{{title}}" />  
        <meta property="og:url" content="{{url absolute="true"}}"/>  
        <meta property="og:type" content="article" />
        <meta property="article:author" content="{{author.website}}">

    {{/contentFor}}
    ... rest of post output ...
{{/post}}

You could define something different to be output in index.hbs:

{{#contentFor "metaTags"}}
    <meta property="og:title" content="{{meta_title}}" />  
    <meta property="og:url" content="{{url absolute="true"}}"/>  
    <meta property="og:type" content="website" />  
{{/contentFor}}

There are a few interesting and potentially confusing points to note about how this works. The block helper looks like {{{block "name"}}}, where name is the name of the placeholder you are defining. The name here needs to match the name you use with the contentFor helper.

Additionally, if you are going to define HTML to be output by the block as in the example above, the block helper needs three braces ({ and }) not two as with most helpers. If you only use two, the HTML will be escaped, using three tells handlebars to trust the output and render it as HTML instead of escaping.

The contentFor helper is a block helper - this means it has opening and closing parts rather than being a single helper. It looks like {{#contentFor "name"}}content here{{/contentFor}}, where name matches the name defined in the block helper, and the content you want to output in the block is between the opening and closing parts.

Note: confusingly the block helper is not a handlebars block helper so it doesn't have a # at the beginning.

Another example of how you might use this would be to add extra classes to the body tag:

In default.hbs:

</head>
<body class="{{body_class}} {{block "customBodyClass"}}">
...

In post.hbs:

{{#post}}
    {{#contentFor "customBodyClass"}}
        {{~#if featured~}}
            {{#if page~}}
                featured-page
            {{~/if}}
        {{~/if~}}
    {{/contentFor}}
{{/post}}

This time, the content I'm outputting is just a class, no HTML, so my {{block}} helper only needs two braces. Adding three wouldn't do any harm, but in this case I don't need them. However, the content I'm outputting does need to be free from additional whitespace so I'm making use of handlebars' new whitespace control feature which uses a ~ character to remove whitespace.

Hopefully, these examples open up some new possibilities for theme developers. For more details of what is possible with Ghost themes, be sure to get familiar with the handlebars, express-hbs and Ghost documentation - all of these resources are updated regularly. Happy theming!

Update 27/10/15: If you need some additional information on how to use layout templates, check out this section of the Ghost theme docs

Today we had another general progress meeting around milestone 0.5. One of the best ways to get visibility on the progress of Apps is to keep an eye on issue #1474. This issue lists open issues, those which have been completed and other useful details.

The delivery date for 0.5 (which was a placeholder) has now been set for Monday 31st March. This means that all PRs for 0.5 need to be submitted by midnight on the 31st to be considered for inclusion. If all goes to plan, this means that 0.5 will be released on the 8th of April.

The team has now delivered a large chunk of the theme section of 0.5. We have some pretty awesome features in there, and we're hopefully going to wrap up the remaining pieces in the next week or so. I'll be adding a specific write-up on that here on the dev blog very soon.

The apps section of 0.5 is also progressing well, although there is still a sizable backlog of open issues. We have reached a somewhat awkward stage of the process where there are 2 or 3 issues which are dependencies for finishing up everything else. However, by mixing theme and other work in with Apps, we're continuing to make excellent progress.

We are still looking for more contributors to take on some of the work, and have started labelling issues that would be suitable to people who are new to Ghost development with beginner. If you'd like to get involved, jump on in - if you want to chat or have any questions come join our IRC channel - #ghost on freenode.

Next week:

Next week's meeting has been set aside to finalise our thoughts and decision making on the future of Ghost's admin UI - that is to determine how we are going to move forward with the admin interms of toolkit, the process for rebuilding, who, what, where when etc. If you're interested in taking part them please come along on Tuesday 25th February, 5:30 GMT.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 25th February, 5:30pm London time.

Today's meeting was a general progress meeting around milestone 0.5. One of the best ways to get visibility on the progress of Apps is to keep an eye on issue #1474. This issue lists open issues, those which have been completed and other useful details.

Ghost apps have made a couple of important steps forward this week. The boilerplate has been improved, and the Ghost-App has been bumped to v0.0.2 and published to npm. The first set of instructions on how to get started with apps are available on the wiki, but are subject to change. Additionally, a new repo Example-Apps has been created to provide examples of how to use functionality as it is added.

The meeting focused heavily on the naming conventions for helpers and filters, and how to gather together a sensible set of filters to add to Ghost 0.5. In particular there was a discussion of whether apps should have any ability to hook into the editor in 0.5, given that those apps would likely break when we refactor the editor in 0.7.

We wrapped up with a discussion about issues which were waiting to be picked up, and who wanted to do what. There are a number of pretty hard and much unloved issues sat in #1474 waiting for someone to grab them, so if you're not involved yet and looking to get stuck in, please do!

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 18th February, 5:30pm London time.

Today we're very pleased to announce an all new look and feel, right here, for the official Ghost blog.

Up until now, our official blog had been running a completely standard implementation of the default Casper theme which ships with every copy of Ghost. It worked very well, to get us started, but we've always wanted to have something a little more custom that's a part of the rest of Ghost.org and properly integrates our branding.

So, that is what you are now looking at!

Along with the new design, we've also added a few bits of new functionality and plans for regularly published content. You can now subscribe to this blog via (weekly) emails, as well as RSS.

We'll be aiming to put together and publish regular content about what goes into building Ghost behind the scenes, who's using Ghost, and how blogging (and online publishing) as an industry continues evolve and shape the world of new media.

What else? You tell us! We've switched on comments for the first time. This is a project with a large community with a passionate voice; so we want to hear your feedback.

What kind of content would you enjoy reading here?

Today's meeting focused specifically on the 'Apps' section of milestone 0.5, as further described by the epic issue #1474. The purpose of the epic is to track progress and provide visibility by grouping the work into related issues with clear & measurable goals.

The majority of the meeting focused around discussing issues to do with 'App Safety and Security'. The Ghost app platform is intended to be stable, reliable and safe to use with a clear one way of doing things. Apps should not be able to gain direct access to either the file system or the database, they should instead make use of the APIs provided by Ghost. This is intended to provide both security as well as making it less likely that Apps break as Ghost evolves as the provided APIs will be maintained abstractions which can be depended upon by App developers.

We accept that it isn't possible to prevent malicious use of the platform in all cases. However, the apps will be sandboxed to prevent access to blacklisted modules in order to deter app developers from using those tools instead of the provided APIs. We aren't 100% sure if this is a good balance between security and creativity, so want to try to land this as early as possible so that app developers can try it out and feed back to us.

The creation of the app platform requires us to roll out ACL across the API and other aspects of Ghost. There are still various aspects of how this will work, specifically with regard to determining which app or user is requesting permission at any given time, which are not clear. We discussed creating clear examples so that the work becomes less theoretical.

Work on the Data API is already on-going. We believe that this will have a big impact on the reliability of Ghost, and give us further room to improve the codebase. Documenting the API is going to be an interesting challenge - we are aware of the limitations of the current format of our documentation, and are in the process of improving this.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 11th February, 5:30pm London time.

With the release of Ghost 0.4.1 yesterday, I wanted to take the time to finish this long put-off post detailing what has changed in the world of Ghost themes since 0.3.3. Yesterday's release included an upgrade to handlebars 1.3.0, so I'll cover highlights of what's new there as well.

The tech

Before we dive into features and fixes, I wanted to quickly outline the technology behind Ghost themes. Theme templates are written in handlebars.js, but handlebars is wired into Ghost using another library called express-hbs. Express-hbs provides additional features which we depend on such as the ability to have a layout file like default.hbs. As both of these tools evolve, so do the possiblities for Ghost themes.

Ghost 0.3.3 used express-hbs 0.2.2, and that in turn used handlebars 1.0.10. Ghost 0.4.1 uses express-hbs 0.7.6 which in turn uses handlebars 1.3.0. This information is useful when trying to determine where and when things have changed.

New features in 0.4

Ghost 0.4 brings many new features which impact on themes. The following outlines how themes should use and cater for those features.

Featured posts

On the content screen in the Ghost admin, it is now possible to mark posts as featured with the 'star' button. This adds a property of featured to those posts, and also outputs a class of featured via the {{post_class}} helper. This allows themes to do interesting things with how these posts are displayed.

So in a theme, you might have something like:

{{#posts}}
    {{#if featured}}
    	...
    {{else}}
        ...
    {/if}
{{/posts}}    

Equally, if you just need to target the post with CSS, you can with .featured.

Featured posts do not move from their place in the chronological post list. We have been asked how to show featured posts separately, or list just featured posts, but unfortunately this isn't quite possible yet.

What you can do is loop through the post count twice, that way if any posts on the current page are featured, you can display them at the top of the current page. This isn't a perfect solution, and we will be providing tools to customise post lists very soon, however it is worth nothing that looping through the post count twice will have minimal performance impact, as the list is already fetched from the database.

Static Pages

Static pages are posts which don't appear in the chronological post list. They are intended to be used for simple content pages, like an 'about' page. By default, Ghost will render pages using post.hbs the same as posts. However, if your theme includes a page.hbs template, Ghost will use that instead. Static pages also get a class of .page from the {{post_class}} helper.

There is no way to build a menu in Ghost, so there is no helper to output one and therefore links to static pages have to be hardcoded into a theme. We recommend including an optional partial for adding a menu to themes, or hardcoding common pages like 'about' pages, and include instructions for how to change it in your README.

Custom Error pages

By adding an error.hbs file to your theme, you can customise the way that Ghost displays errors. Currently this works for both 404 and 500 errors, although there is some discussion around whether it should only be for 404 errors as the most common 500 error that can occur is an error with a theme.

The error page gets very specific information, namely the error {{code}}, an error {{message}} and in some cases a stack trace. There is an example of how to template the stack trace in Ghost's default error template /core/server/views/user-error.hbs.

Be careful what you put in an error.hbs template. Having errors on the error page is never a good situation!

Subdirectory support

URLs in config.js can now contain a subdirectory, meaning users can set their blog to appear at http://my-ghost-blog.com/blog which was not possible before. Although nothing to do with theming, this has implications for creating links to assets. Ghost themes frequently have to add references to script, style, image and other files which they depend upon. Currently those links are static, hard-coded references that break if the Ghost url contains a subdirectory.

The asset helper solves this problem, as well as allowing us to improve the caching of static assets so that themes load faster. We highly recommend that all Ghost themes upgrade to use the {{asset}} helper for all asset URLs. Casper 0.9.2 has this improvement, and it's as simple as switching out a static url like /assets/css/screen.css to {{asset "css/screen.css"}}. The asset helper assumes that assets are kept in a folder inside your theme called assets.

Customisable favicon

With the addition of the asset helper, it is now also possible to add a custom favicon.ico file to a theme. For full details please see the section on favicons under the asset helper in the theme docs

Changes to the Ghost helpers

For full details of the helpers, see the theme docs.

New:

{{assets}} - allows you to build robust links to your asset files - asset helper docs.

{{encode}} - provides for encoding data, for example when building links to sharing services - encode helper docs.

Updated:

{{tags}} - added prefix and suffix options - tags helper docs.

{{excerpt}} - added unicode character support - excerpt helper docs.

Bug Fixes

Support for template partials in Ghost 0.3.3 was really sketchy. They often didn't work properly in production mode, definitely didn't work if a theme was symlinked, and it was just generally buggy. Even worse, in 0.4, empty partials would completely crash Ghost.

0.4.1 includes a number of improvements to partial handling, template caching and also error handling, so that Ghost will keep running even when themes do unexpected and broken things. When things do go wrong, instead of crashing with an error in the console, you'll get a proper Ghost error page with a stack trace. Even if the theme is completely unavailable (i.e. if you rename or delete the theme) Ghost will start and run so you can access the admin panel and change which theme is active.

What's new in handlebars?

Note, handlebars has undergone many changes, these are just a couple of highlights:

Subexpressions

It is now possible to pass the output from one helper into another helper. This feature is called subexpressions and is achieved by using parentheses. This is particularly useful in Ghost if you want to encode a URL for use in a share link:

{{encode (url absolute="true")}}

Whitespace Control

Handlebars has added the ability to strip additional whitespace from around a helper by adding a ~ character to the helper.

For example, when outputting a post list you may wish to add whitespace control like so:

{{#posts ~}}
	<ul>
        ...
    </ul> 
{{~/posts}}

A note to all theme developers

During the development of 0.4 it came to our attention that an enterprising theme developer had discovered an interesting 'feature'. If you use {{content words="0"}} instead of returning nothing, Ghost will return the first image or video if one appears in the post before the text content. Although this is technically a bug, we decided not to fix it until there is an alternative way to provide a cover image for a post - this 'feature' is now covered by our test suite so that it can't accidentally disappear in the same way as it accidentally appeared.

If you stumble across other hacks, workarounds or potential bug-features like this, please do let us know! That way we can ensure that we don't accidentally remove things you are relying on without warning. Equally, if you ever manage to break Ghost whilst theming it, please do raise a bug on GitHub, we want to make Ghost indestructible.

Thank you for all the amazing themes you have created so far. We look forward to seeing what you do with the new features in 0.4, and hope you'll come and help us test the features we are building in 0.5.

Today, we're announcing Ghost 0.4.1 - which is a maintenance release.

With great features come great responsibilities. And great bugs. Today's release is heavily focused on ironing out some of the kinks in Ghost 0.4.

Here's what's new:

• [Security] Improved password reset comparison
• [Fixed] SSL config errors
• [Fixed] Several login/session problems
• [Fixed] Post settings input errors
• [Fixed] Errors in themes no longer crash Ghost
• [Fixed] Consistent paths for storing images
• [Fixed] Import tool browser compatibility
• [Fixed] Issues with unicode characters in post urls
• Lots more

How to Upgrade

Users of our Hosted Platform will be automatically updated within the next 24 hours. In fact, many of you have been running Ghost 0.4.1 since before this post was even published! You're welcome.

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you can download Ghost 0.4.1 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on Github.

Enjoy!

Since launching 0.4 two weeks ago, there has been a pretty hectic 0.4.1 maintenance cycle in progress. Many and various bugs were pulled from the backlog, and several important new issues were raised and added from changes made in 0.4.

As a result, 24 bugs are now sat on the 0.4-maintenance branch, waiting to be shipped out. The deadline for PRs is officially midnight (about an hour from now). The release candidate will be published first thing tomorrow morning, and the public release of 0.4.1 should occur on either Wednesday or Thursday depending on how testing goes.

Meanwhile, planning and preparations are underway for the official kick-off of 0.5 in tomorrow's public dev meeting. The Roadmap for 0.5 has been hashed out in detail, and the planned features listing has also received a significant update to reflect the current state of planning for milestones 0.5-0.9. These documents constantly updated as we develop our plans for getting to Ghost 1.0.

In short, 0.5 aims to deliver the very first iteration of apps for Ghost, including the first official Ghost app: the Ghost Importer.

Tomorrow's public dev meeting is an opportunity for anyone and everyone to help us discuss and finalise the plans for what will be delivered in 0.5. It's also a great opportunity to come along and find out where and how you could get involved. We hope to see you there.

This was our first meeting since shipping 0.4. The release of 0.4 went reasonably smoothly, especially for such a large release. The majority of people have had no issues with upgrading, however there are a few bugs which need ironing out, so we have planned the release of 0.4.1.

0.4.1

The next maintenance release aims to clear down the backlog of open bugs, as well as investigate and resolve / improve a few issues that we are seeing crop up since the release of 0.4:

1. Memory usage. This increased significantly in 0.4, and it's still not clear whether the usage is entirely stable.

2. Error handling. Themes introduce unknowns, right now we don't handle errors from themes as well as we should.

3. Sessions. There have been numerous reports of strange issues with logins / sessions. Some of these are known/fixed, but there are still a few we haven't figured out yet.

There are already a good number of bugs fixed in 0.4.1. The intention is to release this version at some point next week, if we can get enough progress made with the above 3 issues.

0.5.0

The roadmap and planned features listings are in the process of being updated. The UI designs will appear soon, along with a flood of issues to get them converted to HTML/SASS and then wired up. More information on 0.5 can be found in the epic that tracks what's going on in the milestone.

One major area concern for apps is safety and security. There is an issue open for discussion about how we can ensure that apps are safe to use. Input from the community would be much appreciated.

Finally, there is a big question mark over the dashboard. he initial plan was to make it possible to enable it with a config option in 0.5, and then have it on for everyone in 0.6. However, the dashboard is almost an entire application in itself and as it stand it doesn't seem like we have enough contributors, especially frontend developers, to deliver it in 0.5. Therefore, the initial planning for 0.5 will not include the dashboard. Instead, we'll plan the dashbaord and have a meeting about it in a few weeks to decide whether to include it, or move it.

Next week's meeting will be the official kick off for 0.5.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 28th January, 5:30pm London time.

It has been a long slog, there have been 374 commits (not including merges) since we released 0.3.3 almost 3 months ago, but the milestone is closed and 0.4 is finally here!

Ghost 0.4 - Aton - is here!

Opening Ghost up to public contributions has been fantastic. The hard work, careful consideration and wide-ranging skill set of our community members has really driven 0.4 to be the first fully grown-up version of Ghost. It's been an amazing transformation to watch.

Thank you

I would like to say a personal thank you to each and every one of the people who contributed to 0.4. Without you, Ghost would not be the platform it is today. I hope to see more PRs from you all soon :)

I would also like to call out just a few people for their extraordinary contributions:

• Fabian Becker - for his incredible number of contributions, which included delivering static pages and subdirectory support, among much, much more
• Harry Wolff - for grabbing Ghost by the proverbials and delivering hard core refactoring work in a carefully considered and managable way
• Sebastian Gierlinger - for re-building our database migrations in such epic style
• Jacob Gable - for his continuous and unwavering dedication to the app platform.

Come join us

Want to see your name on the next release? Come get stuck in with us on GitHub. The official kick-off for 0.5 will happen during the public dev meeting on Tuesday 14th January at 17:30 UTC in the #ghost IRC channel on Freenode. Details of what we have planned for 0.5 are currently being updated on the roadmap.

Release Notes:

This version has focused heavily on refactoring Ghost, with a large number of non-user facing changes. These release notes detail only the features, fixes and changes that we consider will be of interest to most Ghost users. For those who are interested, the full changelog is available as a gist.

New Features

• static pages
• unsaved changes notification
• featured posts
• sexy new loading bar
• quick edit post URL
• date based permalink support.
• subdirectory support
• gravatar for user images
• SSL support
• welcome email on blog creation
• available update notifications
• tag helper has suffix and prefix property
• new encode helper

Noteworthy Changes

• notifications are now bottom left
• switch to busboy for uploads
• switch to server side sessions
• more secure password reset process
• sort by publish date on content screen
• time supported in published date
• support for SVG images when uploading
• swapped nodejs-bcrypt for bcryptjs

Important bug fixes

• duplicate content on content screen
• content disappears after publishing
• issues with partials and theme switching
• email address is not case sensitive on signin
• reversed post order on import
• unicode characters in post slugs are converted to ascii
• unpublished posts are not accessible
• no negative posts per page
• content & excerpt helpers work with unicode characters
• punctuation in titles not properly respected
• preview pane in editor no longer editable

These are just a few highlights. The 0.4 release contains almost 100 minor bug fixes, including numerous fixes to styling, the markdown editor, admin interface behaviour, security, rss feeds and the Casper theme.

Ghost has also been refactored significantly, meaning the codebase is considerably improved. Some key areas of refactor work occurred around config loading and management, storage and retrieval of paths and URLs, the removal of the ghost.js file, cleanup work around the API and a complete re-write of the database migrations system.

Finally, there has also been significant advances in the test suite, including running tests against sqlite, mysql and pg, improvements to unit, functional and integration tests and the ability to generate a coverage report. This improved test suite makes it easier for us to move faster and deliver more features with confidence in the future.

Notes on key features

A few of our new features are worthy of further explanation.

Static pages

You can now toggle any post to be a "page" from within your post settings menu on the editor or content screen. This will remove it from your post feed. About / Contact / Terms galore!

Unsaved changes notifications

We'll now give you a heads up when you're about to lose unsaved changes. So you can, you know, save.

Featured posts

Clicking the star on the content screen will mark a post as featured. Featured posts get an extra class so they can be styled differently.

Sexy new loading bar.

Always know when Ghost is doing something, a little blue bar crawls across the screen to let you know!

Quick edit post URL

You can now slap /edit/ on the end of any post URL and, boom, you're editing it.

Date based permalink support.

Available from the general settings menu, you can now get Ghost to output URLs in the format: /:year/:month/:day/:slug/ rather than just /:slug/.

Subdirectory support

You can now configure your URL in config.js to contain a subdirectory, such as http://my-ghost-blog.com/blog/.

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by Hannah Wolfe, Fabian Becker, Sebastian Gierlinger, John O'Nolan, Harry Wolff, Jacob Gable, William Dibbern, Jakob Gillich, Matthew Harrison-Jones, Michael Bradshaw, Zach Schneider, cobbspur, jamesbloomer, Dane Springmeyer, Sebastian Gräßl, Zach Geis, buddhamagnet, Benjamin Chodoroff, Daniel Hanson, Gabor Javorszky, Mark Berger, Matt DuVall, Patrick Garman, Seb Gotvitch, Tim Griesser, Tony Gaskell, b1nd, germanrcuriel, remixz, sjama, Ben Gladwell, Declan cook, Derek Myers, Devin Doolin, Enrique Chavez, Harry Walter, Henning Sprang, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Jacques Marneweck, Jeff Escalante, Jonathan Johnson, Jono Warren, Jorge Niedbalski, Karl Mikkelsen, Karolis Dzeja, Kumar Abhinav, Lev Gimelfarb, Lucas, Luke Arduini, Manuel Gellfart, Matheus Azzi, Matt Florence, Matt Hughes, Matthew DuVall, Michael Nason, Micheil Smith, Nick Donohue, Nick Pfisterer, Nick Schonning, Pascal Borreli, Paul, Paul Adam Davis, Peter deHaan, Ryan Powell, Ryan Seys, Sean Hellwig, Simone D'Amico, StevenMcD, Talon, Thomas Faurbye Nielsen, Tim Mansfield, Tom Gillett, Vineet Sinha, WangSai, Will Glynn, William Golden, Zlatan Vasović, abe33, ali, andy matthews, danschumann, enahs, jtw, moritz haarmann, nason, nicovalencia, omeid and rektide.

Thank you all!

Today we are releasing Ghost 0.4 - the next minor release of the Ghost blogging platform. With a great deal of shiny new things.

This release represents a total of 374 commits across 178 issues from 88 incredible contributors all over the world. It's a cleaner, faster, more sophisticated Ghost all round. It enjoys Johnnie Walker Blue Label Scotch, Mozart, and the refined flavour of a premium cigar.

Aton - the Egyptian God of Sun - is the first release named for one of our 3 Kickstarter backers who pledged £1,000 to making Ghost a reality last year. Aton Energy develops smart, clean technologies to make your life easier and greener. They're pretty awesome.

What's in The Box

Ghost 0.4 is chock full of features, improvements and fixes. We really think you're going to love this update. Here are just a few of our favourite things in this release:

• Static pages. You can now toggle any post to be a "page" from within your post settings menu. This will remove it from your post feed. About / Contact / Terms galore!
• Unsaved changes notifications. We'll now give you a heads up when you're about to lose unsaved changes. So you can, you know, save.
• Featured posts. You can now mark posts as featured, and style them accordingly from within your theme.
• Sexy new loading bar. Always know when Ghost is doing something, a little blue bar crawls across the screen to let you know!
• Quick edit post urls. You can now slap /edit/ on the end of any post URL and, boom, you're editing it.
• Date based permalink support. If you like that kind of thing.
• SSL support and a more secure password reset process.
• Over 100 bugfixes and minor improvements!
• Much, much more

Ghost 0.4 also introduces an automatic update check service to let you know when a new version of Ghost is available (woo!). Ghost.org collects basic anonymous usage statistics from update check requests. For more more information, see the update-check.js file in Ghost core. This service can be disabled with a flag in config.js at any time, if required.

How to Upgrade

Users of our Hosted Platform on Ghost.org will be automatically updated over the course of the coming days. Have some Jonny Walker Blue Label and put your feet up. You're welcome.

For people running Ghost on their own servers, you will need to download Ghost 0.4 and then check out the upgrade documentation over on Github. If you're using the default theme without modifications, be sure to drop in a fresh copy of that - too!

Credits

This release was lovingly crafted by...

Hannah Wolfe, Fabian Becker, Sebastian Gierlinger, John O'Nolan, Harry Wolff, Jacob Gable, William Dibbern, Jakob Gillich, Matthew Harrison-Jones, Michael Bradshaw, Zach Schneider, cobbspur, jamesbloomer, Dane Springmeyer, Sebastian Gräßl, Zach Geis, buddhamagnet, Benjamin Chodoroff, Daniel Hanson, Gabor Javorszky, Mark Berger, Matt DuVall, Patrick Garman, Seb Gotvitch, Tim Griesser, Tony Gaskell, b1nd, germanrcuriel, remixz, sjama, Ben Gladwell, Declan cook, Derek Myers, Devin Doolin, Enrique Chavez, Harry Walter, Henning Sprang, Jacob Kaplan-Moss, Jacques Marneweck, Jeff Escalante, Jonathan Johnson, Jono Warren, Jorge Niedbalski, Karl Mikkelsen, Karolis Dzeja, Kumar Abhinav, Lev Gimelfarb, Lucas, Luke Arduini, Manuel Gellfart, Matheus Azzi, Matt Florence, Matt Hughes, Matthew DuVall, Michael Nason, Micheil Smith, Nick Donohue, Nick Pfisterer, Nick Schonning, Pascal Borreli, Paul, Paul Adam Davis, Peter deHaan, Ryan Powell, Ryan Seys, Sean Hellwig, Simone D'Amico, StevenMcD, Talon, Thomas Faurbye Nielsen, Tim Mansfield, Tom Gillett, Vineet Sinha, WangSai, Will Glynn, William Golden, Zlatan Vasović, abe33, ali, andy matthews, danschumann, enahs, jtw, moritz haarmann, nason, nicovalencia, omeid and rektide.

Thank you all!

Ghost 0.4 is available right now on Ghost.org. Users of the Ghost hosted platform will be automatically upgraded over the coming days.

It's been a few weeks since the last meeting due to the holidays. During the holiday period, we've still been working to lock down and finalise 0.4, but work has been much slower than usual. This, as well as the refactoring work done in 0.4 surfacing quite a few bugs, has lead to a significant delay.

The good news is that 0.4 is now completely locked down to 'serious bug fixes only'. A pre-release has been published for testing purposes, and another pre-release likely will be published tomorrow. If everything continues to go well with the testing process, 0.4 is set to ship on Monday 13th January.

During the meeting we discussed some of what caused the delay with 0.4, and how we plan to prevent this from happening in the future. We now have a planned 'official focus' for each milestone from 0.5 - 0.9 which work will center around. PRs which aren't part of the official focus are still very much welcomed, but shouldn't expect to be merged until the official focus has been achieved.

The GitHub milestones page and the roadmap have been updated to reflect these goals, and will see further updates over the coming week. Next week's meeting will be the official kick-off of 0.5.

Full details:

The full logs of the meeting are available from Slimer, our IRC bot (who is also on GitHub by the way!).

Help wanted!

This week we need as many eyes on the pre-releases as we can get! Please help us out by downloading the latest pre-release from GitHub, and trying it out. We've published some tips on what to test, and we also have detailed guidelines on raising bugs. Thank you!

What is this?

We hold a public development meeting pretty much every Tuesday at 5:30pm London time in the #ghost channel on freenode. 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 weeks meeting: Tuesday 14th January, 5:30pm London time.