You may have noticed that I’ve changed the look of the blog. Actually, the observant reader would also notice that the software running the blog has switched to WordPress. After running Ghost for about a year off and on, I’ve decided to abandon the platform.
Node.js
So, part of the issue is my workflow is still more or less optimized for PHP websites. That is, I don’t have to worry about if Ghost is still up and running. I’ve had a few instances where my blog, for whatever reason, required me to restart it via the CLI. My virtual server runs PHP FPM already because of a few other services that I continue to operate. It seems a no-brainer to drop Ghost.
In a lot of ways, Node.js is better than PHP. Certainly, I prefer to write backend code in Javascript every time. I just feel like there’s a missing piece where I can easily manage multiple, independent node.js applications. (I believe Passenger fills this roll, but I haven’t done enough research on it.)
Keep It Simple?
I think Ghost tries to opt for simplicity. Ironically, I feel this is exactly what makes it more difficult to use for me. Ghost just wasn’t very extendable or customizable. I think that’s unfortunate, because in a lot of ways it feels more modern than WordPress. However, it came down to the fact that I wasn’t able to find anything I couldn’t do more easily on WordPress with less time.
I have to add, WordPress 5.8 has a much better editor than Ghost does, and isn’t that kind of the whole point?