Ghost Will Take Your Boring Blog To The Next Astral Plane

To paraphrase Cracker, I would wager what the world needs now is another content management system like I need a hole in the head. However, I’m pleased to note that I will allow Ghost a pass.

Ghost is an open source publishing platform with Markdown compatibility and a real-time preview features as well as a very robust statistics-gathering system. It is on Kickstarter now and is fully funded. Funders will get early access to the platform which will be free. $16 gets you access to the service.

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“I came up with Ghost due to the frustrations of trying to manage both small and large blogs with other platforms. They generally fall into two categories. Either complicated content management systems which can “do everything” – or overly simple social networks which are pretty much just for sharing photos of cats. Ghost is about bloggers, it’s about publishing, it’s about journalism, and it’s about promoting and enabling real writing for the web,” said the founder, John O’Nolan. O’Nolan worked as Deputy Head of the WordPress UI Group until he decided to strike off on his own.

“Ghost is different from competitors in that it’s open source, completely focused on publishing (not content management like Squarespace/WordPress), and non-profit. And it’s lead by a designer (me) as opposed to most open source projects, headed up by devs,” he said. O’Nolan has built websites for Microsoft, Nokia, and Virgin Atlantic. He is working with Hannah Wolfe, senior developer at Moo.com, and Rob Hawkes of Mozilla.

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The product allows WordPress programmers to convert their code quickly and easily into Ghost’s native framework. The open source version of the software will launch in September 2013, a month after the launch of the Kickstarter version.

The real value of the platform isn’t quite ready to demo but thus far it looks quite promising. The Markdown compatibility is obviously important as is the multi-user features that O’Nolan is building in. Furthermore, any new publishing platform is worth a second look – or a $16 investment – especially when it looks so darn beautiful.