- Oct 30, 2013
- by Dave Matteson
Ghost is a new blogging platform that has recently been released to the public after a highly successful Kickstarter, followed by a closed testing period. Upon learning about it, many people immediately respond “What’s wrong with WordPress?” The answer is, if WordPress works great for you, then nothing. But WordPress has grown tremendously over the years, it’s not a simple blogging platform any more. It’s evolved to support a major use case for it nowadays; a full fledged CMS. As such, for those that only need a platform for blogging, they can do with something more focused. That’s the niche Ghost was created to fill. It’s not trying to be a CMS, it’s just trying to be a great blogging platform. It’s also written using Node.js, which didn’t exist when WordPress was created. WordPress websites are written in PHP, and while you can set up a stack for PHP that has Node.js-like concurrency and speed, Node.js is fast out of the box, if not widely supported on Shared hosting platforms.
There’s a new generation of web applications emerging like Ghost. As the old guard has grown over the years, and become larger and more feature rich, some users yearn for trimmed down, more focused software. This inevitably leads to some of those users to put on their developer hats and make that software that they want to use. This is great for everyone. Even if you continue to use WordPress, as a competing platform gains popularity, the WordPress developers will have to react to the competition, and whether they do so by adding features, improving performance, refining the interface or a mix of all of those, it means evolution and improvement for everyone.
If you’re curious about this application and looking for Ghost Hosting, we’ve added Ghost to the A2 QuickInstaller for CentOS 6 on our Virtual Private Servers. We will be rolling it out to other Templates and the Cloud VPS soon. You can also install Node.js via the QuickInstaller and then download and install Ghost for yourself. It’s totally free and really cool.