Ghost is a completely open source product built almost entirely by a small group of volunteers and a few full-time employees of the non-profit organisation which stewards the project.

It's impossible for our core team and small group of volunteers to meet every single request - and, of course, we have our own roadmap and ideas for what to build, too.

Normally, with a closed platform, you have no recourse if the core team isn't focused on your feature request; the conversation ends there. But the entire point of open source is that if you're knowledgeable and passionate about something which would improve the software, then you are still able to implement it yourself.

That's the freedom which open source grants you.

If you choose to make a modification to the software and send that change upstream in the form of a Pull Request, and it's a good feature which is broadly applicable to most people, then it can be accepted for others to also benefit from your work. If everybody helps to improve the software, then everybody benefits from each-other's changes.

If you're not a developer or don't have time build a feature yourself, you can always pay someone else to build it for you – commonly known as sponsoring an issue. Either you have a motivation to build it yourself, or you provide someone else with an economic motivation to build it for you.

Not every feature makes it upstream. It may be that you build something custom just for yourself. That's ok too. For example, Apple use Ghost internally to run hundreds of micro-sites for their different teams, but their own security policies meant that they elected to fork and remove Ghost's user-system and replace it with a SAML implementation that was compatible with their corporate auth. Totally fine. Not something which will ever make it upstream. But the fact that Ghost is open source meant they were able to do it.

Most features in Ghost start out with someone wondering why something doesn't exist yet, and then deciding to build it themselves.

If you're interested in contributing to Ghost, here's a guide to help get started.