2.1 What Is Ghost?

Welcome to the course. In this lesson, we're talking about the ghost platform and you'll learn what it is, and why it's a good alternative to WordPress for creating a blog. Let's begin. At its core, Ghost is a platform for creating blogs. That's why it's made. That's how it's structured. So you can't really use it as a content management system or CMS. For creating any kind of website, like you would use WordPress, for example, now, ghost is made for creating blogs. And that's it. And that's very good thing. Plus ghost has some tools you can use to monetize your blog by selling premium subscriptions. Therefore, you have the option to create a sustainable business around your content. It's actually quite simple. You can decide which blog post is free for everyone to see and which is available for paying members. People then buy a monthly or annual subscription and gain access. To your premium content. The Ghost dashboard then shows you how many members you have and gives you relevant financial information about your earnings. The great part about all this is that Ghost actually takes zero percent payment fees. So, you actually get 100% of your earnings from subscriptions, which is pretty awesome. You also have a super simple post editor and you can publish your articles on the website, but also send them directly to your subscribers email addresses. So ghost is an amazing platform for publishing articles because that's what the team behind ghosts focussed on and that's what they've been constantly making better, and better over the years. We've covered ghost previously on Tuts Plus, but the current version at the time of this recording which is version for, is a lot better than what we previously showed you. And you can use ghost for pretty much any topic you want. Just show you a few examples of blogs, published with ghosts. We have the gradient which is a digital magazine. Covering Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. We have the Harvard international review, which covers a large range of topics from agriculture to science and technology. The browser is also built with ghost. And it's a great example of monetizing with the platform. Readers can subscribe to the publication by picking a plan. And they can clearly see what they're getting for their money in this pricing table. Finally, the Unsplash Blog is also built with Ghost. So as you can see a lot of high profile publications use ghost to power their blogs and you should consider doing that as well. That doesn't mean WordPress or any other CMS is out there or not good. It just means that all of these tools are good for various things and when it comes to publishing, ghost is just a little bit better. In some regards, if you were to build a more complex website with e commerce and forums and stuff like that. Then WordPress will obviously be a better choice or any other CMS is like that. Now, this course is about creating your own blog with ghost and Envato elements. And I brought elements In the discussion because that's a great place you can get ghost themes. So when you're creating your blog, obviously ghost is a great platform by itself but to stand out. You do need to grab A custom theme and a further customize that to match your branding. And that's exactly what I'm gonna show you in the next few lessons. So the first step we're gonna take is to create a local development environment for ghosts. So, I'm gonna show you that in the next lesson. I'll see you there.