WordPress, being the most popular CMS, needs no introduction for most people. It’s everywhere, literally (even on the blog you’re on, right now). While, WordPress is great, it is becoming increasingly bloated and complex for simple blogging.
Ghost is a popular Kickstarter project, backed by quite a lot of people in its early stages. The catch here is that, Ghost wants to do only one thing, and that is to be a blogging platform.
Internally, there are huge differences between WordPress and Ghost. The former is apparently based on PHP and MySQL. The latter doesn’t use any of those. Ghost is written entirely in Javascript and basing on Node.js, which is like the coolest thing right now in web development.
Node.js is a platform for running Javascript on the server (JS was meant to be a client side language) and build highly scalable apps, using asynchronous aka non-blocking I/O. This means that, Ghost will be much faster, scalable and simpler to manage.
Like in WordPress, theming is a big deal in Ghost too. Because it’s based off JS, Ghost uses HandlebarsJS, a popular Javascript templating library. It’s much simpler than say, writing WP themes in PHP. Take a look at the image below for reference.
With all the technology aside, Ghost is well designed and easy to use. The web app is responsive, so it works just fine on mobiles. The dashboard is informative and shows numbers on overall reach of your blog.
In short, Ghost seems to be perfect for small blogs. It lets you concentrate on content, rather than managing the blog.
Ghost is free, open source and public. You can download it today, throw it on localhost and give it a try.
Link: Ghost