Is This Kickstarter Project the Future of Blogging?

Ghost, an open-source blogging platform that hopes to shake up the personal publishing space, is nearing the end of its Kickstarter journey.

Almost a month ago, Ghost launched with what seemed like an audacious goal: Raise £25,000 to help create a new web platform dedicated to publishing. To date, the project has raised £150,000 (that's $226,000 in U.S. dollars), and it has a shot at making its £250,000 stretch goal.

So what is it about Ghost that has resonated with users, developers and writers?

I spent some time talking with John O'Nolan, the founder and project leader of Ghost, about Kickstarter, open-source software and the future of publishing.

The Genesis of an Idea

O'Nolan is a familiar name to those who have followed the WordPress community. An accomplished designer and developer, O'Nolan started working there in 2005. From 2009 to 2011, he was the deputy head of the WordPress UI Group, and helped shape the platform's look and feel.

Since its inception, WordPress has become phenomenally successful. In the course of 10 years, the project has gone from being a fork of a little-known blogging platform to powering over 18% of the web.

As WordPress has grown in features, it has also grown in complexity. The initial focus on blogging — at least for hosted users — has dissipated, as the platform becomes more focused on being what co-creator Matt Mullenweg has called "the platform for the web."

In November, O'Nolan published a personal blog post describing an idea for a version of WordPress that is focused solely on blogging.

The post resonated with a lot of users. I commented on that vision for Ghost on my personal blog mainly because the concept of an open-source publishing platform with a focus on writing, UI and simplicity, appeals to me.

The original vision of Ghost was meant to be written on top of WordPress to leverage the massive community of themes and plugins that exist in its ecosystem.

As I wrote then:

"Yes, there are lots of alternatives — but part of what has made WordPress, well, WordPress is its broader community of themes, plugins and developers. It'd be great to be able to take some of those features, some of that compatibility and focus it on the simple aspect of publishing."

After seeing the response to his initial blog post, O'Nolan knew he was onto something.

Evolution of a New Platform

While the original idea was for Ghost to use WordPress as its base, it became clear to O'Nolan that this wouldn't be possible for technical and philosophical reasons.

Most publishing systems — including WordPress — are built on PHP. Ghost is following some of the larger trends happening in web development, and is written in Node.js. This makes Ghost one of the first full-featured blogging platforms built off of JavaScript.

Still, O'Nolan wants the platform to provide themes and customization options. One of the reasons that WordPress soared so far ahead of other blogging and CMS systems was the fact that it was easy to create and distribute themes to others.

O'Nolan promises that theming will be easy for existing WordPress developers to pick up. WooThemes and Envato — two powerhouse companies in the commercial WordPress market — are committed to developing themes and plugins for Ghost.

While Ghost is open-source and the code will be available on GitHub (O'Nolan is waiting for the project to exit its current prototype stage before making the code public) for users who want to host it themselves, Ghost will also have a hosted offering.

Describing the offering as "less like WordPress.com and more like Page.ly," the hosted service aims to both generate revenue to pay developers to work on the project, as well as to offer users a way to access the Ghost experience with as little overhead as possible.

"It's basically a managed hosting provider," O'Nolan explained to me. The point isn't to limit what users can do with their site, but rather to give them the best-tuned environment to use Ghost.

If Ghost reaches its £250,000 stretch goal, all backers will receive a free year on the hosted service.

Of course, users who want to extend or alter Ghost on their own servers can do that, too.

Building an Ecosystem

Beyond just hosting and themes, Ghost is also looking to court plugin developers. The project is already offering free Node.js lessons to help PHP developers get on board with the new language.

There are also plans for an Open Ghost Marketplace where developers can sell their plugins and themes.

Licensing issues can always be complex, especially when they become about ideology, and O'Nolan is hoping to limit that aspect of the discussion by using what he finds to be the most open and permissive license, the MIT License.

The MIT license is compatible with the GPL, which means that WordPress developers who want to reuse some of their old code with Ghost can do so, and distribute a theme or plugin under that license as well.

The goal for Ghost is to have a healthy ecosystem of free and paid components. WordPress and Drupal have both managed to achieve this balance, but it's important to note the importance of free plugins and themes for the proliferation of a platform — particularly in the beginning.

Open-Source and Non-Profit

One of the more interesting aspects of Ghost is that O'Nolan wants to run it as a non-profit. In a Kickstarter update posted after Yahoo's $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, he talks about the benefits of having software that is open-source and backed by a non-profit entity.

He writes:

"Ghost is a non-profit. We'll make money from our premium hosted service, but we'll use 100% of the money to make Ghost better and pay people to work on it. We won't distribute any profits to shareholders, because there won't be any shareholders. A non-profit has trustees who don't own shares, they just oversee the company. We literally won't have anything for Yahoo! to buy."

While the non-profit and open-source nature of the project may not be a huge selling point to average users, it's at least good lip service for users that are worried about the potential for commercial entities to inject too much influence into open-source projects.

Of course, there is nothing necessarily stopping for-profit commercial entities or developers from adopting, forking and extending Ghost.

In all likelihood, the impact (or lack thereof) of a non-profit status of the company behind Ghost will only become clear if the project manages to find major mainstream success.

What do You Think?

Ghost is just one of several different publishing platforms that are trying to remake the personal publishing market. In addition to the long-standing leaders such as WordPress, Tumblr and Blogger, there are other platforms, including Medium and Svbtle, that eschew a similar writer-first philosophy.

On the flip-side, there are self-hosted systems such as Jekyll, Octopress, Hyde, Punch and Pelican that act as static site-generators for publishing.

This is where I think Ghost has potential because it can act as an intersection between the nerdier aspects of something like Octopress and the more user-friendly aspects of something like Medium.

Is Ghost going to be able to overtake WordPress? No. At this point, WordPress is much more than just a blogging engine or even CMS — it's its own web framework.

However, for the niche of individuals who are interested in personal publishing that is simple — but still want to control the look of their content — this doesn't mean Ghost doesn't have tremendous potential.

Tell us what you think about Ghost in the comments.

Homepage image courtesy of Rick Nunn