Writing on the web post-Jekyll, Ghost edition

Jekyll does not seem to do well. Despite being used by GitHub for GitHub pages, largely used plugins from the community — such as jekyll-assets, — are falling behind Jekyll 4 or the end of life of Ruby 2.

Ghost has very convincing pros: it is easy, fast and beautiful. It also has everything one can need fully integrated when you just start publishing.

But for a technical person such like me, who has an history of web publishing behind, it also has major cons:

  • MySQL over PostgreSQL. I already run a PostgreSQL DB. I don’t want to run another one;
  • All the built-ins (SEO, analytics) are lost when Ghost is used as a headless CMS;
  • Poor markdown support: line breaks are preserved in posts;
  • Lack of control over the HTML that is being produced;
  • No support of multiple websites for small publishers.

As such, Ghost does not sound like a good CMS solution for me. To be continued. 💻

Mick F @dirtyhenry