Feature Index

An exhaustive list of everything Ghost can do

Site Management

Custom Branding

Take control of your site's branding with sensible settings inside Ghost Admin to manage your logos, icons, cover image and accent color.

Posts

The primary data type within Ghost is the post. Posts allow you to build simple or complex collections of regularly published content.

Pages

For static content, rather than a feed of posts, pages allow for easy creation of things like Contact and About pages.

Easy Navigation Menu

Create and manage your site's global navigation menu with ease from a simple user interface without any fuss.

Site Password

Hide your site from the public by placing into private mode and requiring a password while you're under construction.

Multi-Language

Publish in any language, or multiple languages! Enjoy flexible, straightforward i18n customisations for your site.

Connected Social Accounts

Make sure your site's metadata is linked directly to your social profiles for rich embeds and deeper social features.

Code Injection

Add custom code to your site's header and footer, site-wide or per page, for when you need extra scripts or styles.

Custom Redirects

Manage custom 301 and 302 redirects to map old URLs to new locations when your content structure has changed.

Timezone Selection

Ensure your site is running on the timezone and the schedule which best suits you and your audience.

Editor

Delightful Writing Experience

Enjoy the best authoring experience for the web, combining the features of the most popular editors out there today.

Full-Screen Editing

No distractions, no clutter, just content. The Ghost editor gets out of your way and lets you focus on what you do best.

Markdown Support

The Ghost editor has Markdown in its DNA, with automatic autocompletion of Markdown syntax as you type.

Intelligent Links

Highlight some text and paste a URL, now you have a link. That's all there is to it! Links can also be added to any image card.

Snippets

Save any content as a snippet to be reused later, perfect for commonly used logos, images, newsletter templates or a call-to-action.

Image Cards

Add rich photography to go with your story and have your images automatically resized and compressed as they upload.

Gallery Cards

For collections of images, use a gallery card to create a fluid collage of beautiful photography, all with captions.

Embed Cards

Add automatic embed from Twitter, YouTube, SoundCloud, Spotify, Instagram, CodePen, Vimeo, Flickr and many more.

Unsplash Cards

Explore the largest high-quality royalty-free image library out there from the world's most generous community of photographers.

Custom HTML Cards

For when you want to include more complex code or specific custom elements, the HTML card has unlimited flexibility.

Custom Markdown Cards

If you prefer a more purist Markdown authoring experience, add a Markdown Card to enter a raw, minimalist writing environment.

Publishing Workflow

Custom URLs

Ghost generates short readable URLs by default, and also allows you to override and configure them however you like.

Tags Taxonomy

Organise your content using dynamic, multi-dimensional tags that work very similarly to Gmail labels to power workflows and automation.

Internal Tags

In Ghost, tags can be extended further with #hashtags which act as a way to privately categorise different content types and functionality.

Post Previews

A beautiful post-preview UI shows what your post will look like on web, mobile, email, social and search - all in one place.

Scheduled Posts

Simple scheduling allows you to set posts and pages to go live at a future date.

Custom Excerpts

Use the excerpt custom field to highlight a summary of your post, or store any accompanying custom data to go with your content.

Featured Posts

Mark posts as Featured in order to give them specific treatment on your site, either with a custom design or specific layout.

Multi-Author Bylines

Add multiple authors to the byline of a post whenever there's been a collaboration between multiple people to work on a particular piece.

Custom Twitter Cards

Create custom content and media for Twitter Cards for fine-grained control over individual posts and pages.

Custom Open Graph Content

Enter a custom title, description and post image for Open Graph content, used by both Facebook and Pinterest social networks.

Podcast Support

Creating custom RSS feeds to submit to popular podcast players like iTunes, or use an integration with a dedicated podcast hosting tool.

Tag & Author Archives

Ghost generates automatic, paginated archives of posts associated with every tag and author, each with automatic RSS feeds and sitemaps.

Custom Post Templates

Set up re-usable generic templates to assign to specific posts or pages for specific page layouts when you have different types of content.

RSS Feeds

Ghost automatically generates RSS feeds for every collection, tag and author archive. Ready to be imported into readers like Flipboard, Feedly or Apple News.

Search Engine Optimisation

No Plugins Needed

Ghost has all the fundamental technical modern SEO built directly into core, without any need to rely on third-party plugins.

Tidy Markup & Attributes

All generated markup is clean and semantic, containing the proper alt attributes on images and link tags for RSS feeds

Automatic Google Sitemaps

Ghost will automatically generate and link to a complete Google sitemap including every page on your site, to make sure search engines are able to index every URL.

Automatic Structured Data

Structured metadata is automatically added to every page for Google, Facebook OpenGraph and Twitter Cards based microformats, no matter the theme.

Robots.txt

Ghost automatically creates a properly formed robots.txt file linking to your sitemap and excluding system folders.

Custom Page Meta

Semantic page titles are automatically created, but can also be manually customised on a per-page basis.

Clean Permalinks

All data in Ghost is automatically created with clean, readable, well-structured permalinks which are easily understood.

Custom URL Structures

The URLs used for different sections of your site can be completely customised depending on your specific needs and data.

Canonical Tags

Ghost automatically generates the correct rel="canonical" tag for each post and page so that search engines always prioritise one true link.

Google AMP Built-in

Enable Accelerated Mobile Pages across your site with one click for superior ranking potential in mobile search results and add a Google Analytics ID for tracking.

Automatic RPC Pings

Whenever new content is published, Ghost pings a variety of external services to let them know the site has been updated and new pages are available for index.

Superior Performance

Speed is an increasingly important factor for search engines, and Ghost is a modern app with performance at its heart. Independent tests have found it to be up to 20x faster than WordPress.

Trusted Service

Ghost is a professional paid service used which actively eliminates spam. Unlike other free services, there's no risk of penalty for being incorrectly grouped with other spam sites.

Memberships & Subscriptions

Member signup

The seamless Portal member signup system allows you to ask your visitors to enter their email address to access protected content.

Recurring subscriptions

Turn members into paying customers with straightforward subscriptions via a Stripe integration. 135 supported currencies with 0% payment fees.

Import/Export Members

Add members to Ghost via CSV export from external platforms, or download your Ghost member list for use elsewhere.

Member webhooks

Ghost delivers a webhook every time a member is added, changed or deleted so you can keep everything in sync with external services.

Email newsletters

Send new posts as email newsletters directly to segments of your members in just a few clicks and keep everything all in one place.

Member stats

Discover which members are the most active, and which pieces of content perform best with a native member stats dashboard.

Member management

Stay on top of your business with a sensible members dashboard. Add labels, notes, or use the impersonate feature to provide quick member support.

Integrations

Apps & Services

Ghost is compatible with just about every third-party app and service out there. A handful are built-in by default, while others can be configured manually.

Zapier

Thanks to Zapier, Ghost easily integrates directly with over 5,000 apps and services to trigger powerful and sophisticated automations and workflows.

Slack

Send notifications to Slack every time a new post is published, along with custom metadata to populate a custom rich Slack unfurl from the message. Never let your teammates miss another post!

FirstPromoter

Create your own custom referral program with FirstPromoter, and offer incentives to people who want to spread the word about your work.

Custom Integrations

Having full control over the front-end, coupled with Ghost's JSON API and a number of useful webhooks, creating custom clientside integrations is straightforward.

Team Management

Staff Users

Invite multiple team members to help manage your site and create posts, with varying levels of permissions.

Roles & Permissions

Staff user access levels include Owner, Administrator, Editor, Author, and contributor; ranging from trusted to untrusted.

Custom Profiles

All staff users come with custom profiles including name, bio, location, and social accounts to populate author metadata.

User Invitations

Send users invitations to sign up as staff users via single-use email authentication tokens which can be issued and cancelled.

Suspend Users

If a team member leaves, suspend their account to maintain all their content but prevent the user from logging in.

Themes

Handlebars.js

Ghost comes with Handlebars Themes by default which are both surprisingly simple and surprisingly powerful, allowing you to very quickly build out a custom publication.

Casper Default

A beautiful magazine-style theme called Casper is the first theme you'll get familiar with when setting up a new site, acting as a solid showcase for what's possible.

Theme Marketplace

There's a wide range of beautiful pre-made Ghost themes available for free and for commercial purposes highlighted on our exclusive theme marketplace, and available for download.

Experts Directory

Find a qualified partner to work on your Ghost project. Vetted for experience our experts are available to contract for design and development.

Custom Themes

Like Ghost itself, themes are open source too. Developing new Handlebars themes for Ghost has a shallow learning curve thanks to extensive theme documentation to get you started.

Automatic Assets

All theme assets are automatically optimised and cached with custom helpers to make sure that performance is always taken into consideration and updates are always processed.

Dynamic Routing

Control exactly how the front end of themes respond to different data structures using Ghost's dynamic routing feature to define custom routes and templates.

GraphQL-like API Helpers

Themes come with built-in helpers to allow you to query the Ghost API for almost any data, using friendly GraphQL-like syntax to filter the results.

Developer API

RESTful JSON API

Ghost is a self-consuming RESTful JSON API at its core and is constructed with a loosely coupled service-based architecture for maximum flexibility.

Detailed Developer Docs

Fully explained concepts, guides, tutorials, API reference, and frequently asked questions are all available within the Ghost Developer Documentation.

Headless CMS

Thanks to its decoupled architecture Ghost functions as a fully headless CMS wherever required, providing content as a service to any app or infrastructure with a selection of powerful SDKs.

Ghost-Admin Client

Out of the box, Ghost comes with a fully-featured Ember.js admin client, however you can easily develop custom admin clients for Ghost to send your own data into the API.

Front-end Agnostic

While Ghost ships with a native Handlebars.js theme-layer by default, it's compatible with any front-end - including Gatsby, Jekyll, Hugo or any other static site generator or mobile application.

Custom Storage Adapters

Ghost's use of local file storage is extensible with custom storage modules for Amazon S3, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform, Dropbox, and many more.

Choice of Database

With a built-in ORM layer Ghost supports both SQLite in development and MySQL in production with extremely minimal configuration.

Webhooks

A selection of events which trigger events in Ghost allow for external notifications and automations to be triggered when specific actions take place in Ghost.

Powerful CLI

Ghost-CLI is a command-line tool for managing Ghost installations which dramatically cuts down the amount of time needed to install, configure and upgrade Ghost for developers.

Theme Compatibility Scans

GScan is a dedicated tool to scan Ghost themes for forwards compatibility, making it easy to figure out how and what needs to change when there's a major new version of Ghost.

Sensible Versioning

Ghost follows SemVer for release versions, providing developers with a sane, predictable upgrade path. No bloat or stagnation, and no breakneck changes.

Community

A Worldwide Network

The Ghost team and the Ghost community are spread across the world and proudly remote first. There is no physical headquarters, just one large online community.

Major Customers

Ghost users are diverse, from personal bloggers to investigative journalists to some of the world's largest technology organisations. The range of Ghost customers is huge.

Discussion Forum

Used for support but also as a way for Ghost users to talk to one another, the Ghost Forum is the home of all Ghost discussion

Active Social Updates

With over 20,000 followers, our Twitter profile is where you can go to find all the latest news and information directly for and from the community

Import & Export

Content Import

Multiple tools are available to import content into Ghost from: Ghost, WordPress, Tumblr, Medium, Jekyll and most Custom CMS

Image Import

You can import images from any external platform into Ghost and access the media directly from your site.

Ghost Export

All content from Ghost can be instantly downloaded as JSON files (content) and zips of media (themes/images).

Data Access

All content from Ghost can also be instantly accessed at any time from anywhere via Ghost's RESTful JSON API.

Content Ownership

Your Data, Your Property

You own all of the data that you put on Ghost, whether hosted with us or elsewhere. All content can be exported at any time, without notice.

Censorship-Free

Ghost is censorship-free open software which actively promotes freedom of speech. We deliberately do not have control over user content.

Ad-Free

You can use any sort of advertising on your site if you want to, but we never run any ads against your content or interfere with your site or data.

No Jibber Jabber

We run a fair, honest business. No tricks. No bait and switch. No sleazy sales tactics. Just great software which does what it says it will. As you would expect.

Managed Infrastructure

Ghost(Pro)

Our fully managed platform-as-a-service (PaaS) makes setting up a new Ghost instance quick and easy, so you can spend more time on your business and less time on your infrastructure.

Our Servers Are Your Servers

We run Ghost using Ghost, on the exact same Ghost(Pro) infrastructure. We've built our business with $millions in revenue on this platform.

Significant Scale

Ghost(Pro) serves well over 200million requests each month, including multiple HackerNews frontpage stories each day. We're used to traffic spikes.

High Availability SLA

All our business and enterprise plans come with a 99.9% uptime SLA to guarantee high availability for the customers who need it the most.

Battle Tested

Ghost has been serving some of the largest organisations in the world for over half a decade. This isn't a half-baked startup figuring how to spend its seed round.

No Plugins Needed

Ghost does not rely on any special caching plugins in order to achieve proper performance. It's a properly developed modern application with all performance optimisations built-in.

Powerful Services

The Ghost(Pro) infrastructure comes as standard with a worldwide CDN, proper load balancing, automatic weekly upgrades, backups, as well as threat and uptime management as standard.

Support

Priority Support

All Ghost(Pro) customers receive priority email support around the clock directly from the creators of Ghost and can reach us directly on [email protected]

Community Support

For users who self-host, Ghost provides a community forum with answers thousands of questions and helpful community members on-hand.

Open Source

Code Ownership

As well as making sure you own the content, Ghost also gives you all of the code. You own it. Forever. The power of open source is that it legally belongs to everyone.

Permissive Open License

All Ghost code ships with the MIT license by default, which is one of the most permissive licenses in the world. Use the software however you like, without restriction on what you do with it.

All Source Code Visible

There are no mysteries about how Ghost works, if you're curious about the functionality, just take a look at the code. It's available for any development team to review.

Unlimited Extensibility

Any functionality can be built into Ghost with a little work. It's all just JavaScript, and it can be adapted, extended or entirely replaced depending on your needs.

Futureproof

Because Ghost is open source, it can never disappear. Even if the foundation ceases to exist, anyone can take the code and keep developing it in future regardless of what happens to the company.

Security

Regular Penetration Testing

Ghost conducts regular penetration testing of its open source codebase and hosted infrastructure both internally as well as with external consultants.

Automatic SSL

Ghost's CLI tool attempts to automatically configure SSL certificates for all new Ghost installs with Let's Encrypt by default.

Standardised Permissions

Ghost-CLI does not run as root and automatically configures all server directory permissions correctly according to OWASP Standards.

Data Validation & Serlialisation

Ghost performs strong serialisation and validation on all data that goes into the database, as well as automated symlink protection on all uploaded files.

Encoded Tokens Everywhere

All user invitation and password reset tokens are base64 encoded with serverside secret. All tokens are always single use and always expire.

Password Hashing

Ghost follows OWASP authentication standards with all passwords hashed and salted properly using bcrypt to ensure password integrity.

SQLi Prevention

Ghost uses an ORM + query builder and does not generate any of its own raw SQL queries. Ghost has no interpolation of variables directly to SQL strings.

XSS Prevention

Ghost uses safe/escaped strings used everywhere, including and especially in all custom Handlebars helpers used in Ghost Themes

Brute-force Protection

User login attempts and password reset requests are all limited to 5 per hour per IP.

Dependency Management

All Ghost dependencies are continually scanned with NSP to ensure their integrity.

Who is it for?

Creators

Focus on your writing with a familiar editor and beautiful admin interface to manage content for professional creators.

Publishers

The world's best businesses use Ghost to power their company blogs and modern brand journalism.

businesses

Ghost makes it easy for publishers to start a professional, independent media business.

Fiercely Independent

Non-Profit Organisation

Ghost Foundation is a registered public non-profit organisation which can never be bought or sold. We committed to a legal structure which mandates independence.

Sustainable Business Model

Ghost is completely self-sufficient and is funded solely by customer subscription revenue from its Ghost(Pro) managed service. It has unlimited runway.

Open & Transparent

We build a company we'd want to do business with, sharing all our finances and our story openly.

Privacy First

Ghost has no business of any kind selling or trading private user information with 3rd parties or advertisers.