Ghost is awesome, it really is! I’ve just started using and developing on it, but I love it already. It’s simple, smooth, and fast. You can feel the speed when you compare it to traditional CMS’ like WordPress or static generators like Jekyll – I find it to triumph both.

Development is pretty damn easy too. Installing Ghost on Windows was a breeze, and starting development even easier. I fired up Prepros, creating a SCSS file for better CSS, and started coding!

Ghost’s writer is it’s biggest advantage, though. Markdown is great to write, and the side-by-side compilation makes writing so much more fun.

However, there are indeed a few practical problems with Ghost that you may encounter soon in one of your projects. I’m going to talk about these here, along with some hacky solutions for them.

  • Images can’t use figure/figcaption: Currently, images on Ghost are simple <img> tags in paragraphs. I was looking around for image captioning and using figure/figcaption there, but with little results. A workaround by Lee Lam could be a quick solution, though.

This is a problem both of Markdown (Which does not seem to support two types of captions, i.e. one for the alt attribute and other a standard caption) and Ghost.

The issue is set to won’t fix until the Haunted Markdown parser is implemented.

  • No support for advanced excerpts: With WordPress, you could simple add a <!-- more --> somewhere and it handled excerpts with read more for you. Unfortuantely, this isn’t the case with Ghost and by default you see a paragraph of plaintext with a trailing …. Not something particularly beautiful.

Kraftner on Ghost Forums gives a great solution to that problem. Using {{ content }} instead of {{ excerpt }} allows you to output HTML instead of plaintext, and combining that with some clever CSS rules displays only one paragraph. I use a similar trick at TLDRtech where all uls are hidden in the ‘excerpt’.

My goal with the post was to highlight some of the common issues, and give hacky solutions for them. That said, I do love Ghost for many, many reasons

  • Ghost is fast. You literally feel the difference on the admin panel of Ghost compared to WordPress’
  • Installing Ghost is a breeze. It took me less than 2 minutes to install Ghost on my Windows computer. Granted, installing it on Apache is a bit more difficult, but there are good guides for that.
  • Theme development on Ghost is fun. Handlebars is fun to write, and I’ve set up SCSS compilation with Prepos as well.