About four years ago Ghost was launched on Kickstarter as a tiny little prototype of an idea to create the web’s next great open source blogging platform. Today marks the 100th release of Ghost and, fittingly, it’s Ghost 1.0.0
This release contains over 2,600 commits of features, refactors, improvements, and fixes to make the entire codebase more robust and more reliable all-round.
A new editor
The headline feature of Ghost 1.0 is a brand new editor, and it’s one that we’re incredibly excited about, because we think it paves the way toward one of the most powerful publishing experiences on the web.
Ghost has always been known and praised for its simple, yet powerful Markdown editor, which allows for a great writing experience alongside easy document formatting.
The new editor offers a tremendous upgrade to that experience, with a cleaner design, a new toolbar, support for Markdown tables, CommonMark, Github-flavoured Markdown and multiple view options depending on whether you prefer a focused single column or a side-by-side preview.
Ghost 1.0 and its upgraded Markdown editor is the first step toward a much more powerful writing experience. Over the rest of the year we’ll be adding support for more content types, and making them extensible so developers can create their own.
A refreshed UI
The ghost dev team has given Ghost admin a fresh lick of paint, tidied up the settings area, re-jigged buttons, a better publishing workflow, and many other small visual improvements.
You can also filter the content screen now by post state, tag and author – so it’s way easier to sort through large archives of content.
A new default theme design
Casper, the default theme, has now reached its 2.0 milestone and has a shiny new look to celebrate the occasion. This new layout was designed to accommodate all the new Ghost features we’ve released over the last few years, and provide a more flexible/customisable base for most publications.
Night shift mode
New in beta, a night shift mode to reverse the colours of Ghost admin for a gentler experience on the eyes when working in dim lighting. (Or just feeling like you’re writing code)
A whole lot more
There are huge number of changes and improvements to enjoy.
- A brand new importer which works a lot better than the old importer.
- Google AMP is now optional rather than always-on.
- Custom redirects can now be set via a config file.
- Users can be suspended if required.
- Collision detection, so if two people are editing a post at the same time they won’t override each other. That was, um. Not ideal.
- A new tour feature for new Ghost users to find their way around.
There are also a huge number of changes for developers in Ghost 1.0, which we’ve covered over on the developer blog. There are important breaking changes to the theme API.
