What sets Ghost apart from other products is that you can publish content and grow your audience using the same platform. Rather than just endlessly posting and hoping someone is listening, you can track real signups against your work and have them subscribe to be notified of future posts. The feature that makes all this possible is called Portal.

Portal is an embedded interface for your audience to sign up to your site. It works on every Ghost site, with every theme, and for any type of publisher.

You can customize the design, content and settings of Portal to suit your site, whether you just want people to sign up to your newsletter — or you're running a full premium publication with user sign-ins and private content.

Once people sign up to your site, they'll receive an email confirmation with a link to click. The link acts as an automatic sign-in, so subscribers will be automatically signed-in to your site when they click on it. There are a couple of interesting angles to this:

Because subscribers are automatically able to sign in and out of your site as registered members: You can (optionally) restrict access to posts and pages depending on whether people are signed-in or not. So if you want to publish some posts for free, but keep some really great stuff for members-only, this can be a great draw to encourage people to sign up!

Ghost members sign in using email authentication links, so there are no passwords for people to set or forget. You can turn any list of email subscribers into a database of registered members who can sign in to your site. Like magic.

Portal makes all of this possible, and it appears by default as a floating button in the bottom-right corner of your site. When people are logged out, clicking it will open a sign-up/sign-in window. When members are logged in, clicking the Portal button will open the account menu where they can edit their name, email, and subscription settings.

The floating Portal button is completely optional. If you prefer, you can add manual links to your content, navigation, or theme to trigger it instead.

Like this! Sign up here

As you start to grow your registered audience, you'll be able to get a sense of who you're publishing for and where those people are coming from. Best of all: You'll have a straightforward, reliable way to connect with people who enjoy your work.

Social networks go in and out of fashion all the time. Email addresses are timeless.

Growing your audience is valuable no matter what type of site you run, but if your content is your business, then you might also be interested in setting up premium subscriptions.

Hey there, welcome to your new home on the web!

Unlike social networks, this one is all yours. Publish your work on a custom domain, invite your audience to subscribe, send them new content by email newsletter, and offer premium subscriptions to generate sustainable recurring revenue to fund your work.

Ghost is an independent, open source app, which means you can customize absolutely everything. Inside the admin area, you'll find straightforward controls for changing themes, colors, navigation, logos and settings — so you can set your site up just how you like it. No technical knowledge required.

If you're feeling a little more adventurous, there's really no limit to what's possible. With just a little bit of HTML and CSS you can modify or build your very own theme from scratch, or connect to Zapier to explore advanced integrations. Advanced developers can go even further and build entirely custom workflows using the Ghost API.

This level of customization means that Ghost grows with you. It's easy to get started, but there's always another level of what's possible. So, you won't find yourself outgrowing the app in a few months time and wishing you'd chosen something more powerful!

For now, you're probably just wondering what to do first. To help get you going as quickly as possible, we've populated your site with starter content (like this post!) covering all the key concepts and features of the product.

You'll find an outline of all the different topics below, with links to each section so you can explore the parts that interest you most.

Once you're ready to begin publishing and want to clear out these starter posts, you can delete the "Ghost" staff user. Deleting an author will automatically remove all of their posts, leaving you with a clean blank canvas.

Your guide to Ghost

• Customizing your brand and site settings
• Writing & managing content, an advanced guide for creators
• Building your audience with subscriber signups
• Selling premium memberships with recurring revenue
• How to grow your business around an audience
• Setting up custom integrations and apps

If you get through all those and you're hungry for more, you can find an extensive library of content for creators over on the Ghost blog.

Getting help

If you need help, Ghost(Pro) customers can always reach our full-time support team by clicking on the Ghost(Pro) link inside their admin panel.

If you're a developer working with the codebase in a self-managed install, check out our developer community forum to chat with other users.

Have fun!

For creators and aspiring entrepreneurs looking to generate a sustainable recurring revenue stream from their creative work, Ghost has built-in payments allowing you to create a subscription commerce business.

Connect your Stripe account to Ghost, and you'll be able to quickly and easily create monthly and yearly premium plans for members to subscribe to, as well as complimentary plans for friends and family.

Ghost takes 0% payment fees, so everything you make is yours to keep!

Using subscriptions, you can build an independent media business like Stratechery, The Information, or The Browser.

The creator economy is just getting started, and Ghost allows you to build something based on technology that you own and control.

Most successful subscription businesses publish a mix of free and paid posts to attract a new audience, and upsell the most loyal members to a premium offering. You can also mix different access levels within the same post, showing a free preview to logged out members and then, right when you're ready for a cliffhanger, that's a good time to...

The Ghost editor has everything you need to fully optimise your content. This is where you can add tags and authors, feature a post, or turn a post into a page.

Access the post settings menu in the top right hand corner of the editor.

Post feature image

Insert your post feature image from the very top of the post settings menu. Consider resizing or optimising your image first to ensure it's an appropriate size.

Structured data & SEO

Customise your social media sharing cards for Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to add custom images, titles and descriptions for social media.

There’s no need to hard code your meta data. You can set your meta title and description using the post settings tool, which has a handy character guide and SERP preview.

Ghost will automatically implement structured data for your publication using JSON-LD to further optimise your content.

{
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "@type": "Article",
    "publisher": {
        "@type": "Organization",
        "name": "Publishing options",
        "logo": "https://static.ghost.org/ghost-logo.svg"
    },
    "author": {
        "@type": "Person",
        "name": "Ghost",
        "url": "http://demo.ghost.io/author/ghost/",
        "sameAs": []
    },
    "headline": "Publishing options",
    "url": "http://demo.ghost.io/publishing-options",
    "datePublished": "2018-08-08T11:44:00.000Z",
    "dateModified": "2018-08-09T12:06:21.000Z",
    "keywords": "Getting Started",
    "description": "The Ghost editor has everything you need to fully optimise your content. This is where you can add tags and authors, feature a post, or turn a post into a page.",
    }
}
    

You can test that the structured data schema on your site is working as it should using Google’s structured data tool.

Code Injection

This tool allows you to inject code on a per post or page basis, or across your entire site. This means you can modify CSS, add unique tracking codes, or add other scripts to the head or foot of your publication without making edits to your theme files.

To add code site-wide, use the code injection tool in the main admin menu. This is useful for adding a Facebook Pixel, a Google Analytics tracking code, or to start tracking with any other analytics tool.

To add code to a post or page, use the code injection tool within the post settings menu. This is useful if you want to add art direction, scripts or styles that are only applicable to one post or page.

From here, you might be interested in managing some more specific admin settings!

It's possible to extend your Ghost site and connect it with hundreds of the most popular apps and tools using integrations.

Whether you need to automatically publish new posts on social media, connect your favorite analytics tool, sync your community or embed forms into your content — our integrations library has got it all covered with hundreds of integration tutorials.

Many integrations are as simple as inserting an embed by pasting a link, or copying a snippet of code directly from an app and pasting it into Ghost. Our integration tutorials are used by creators of all kinds to get apps and integrations up and running in no time — no technical knowledge required.

Zapier

Zapier is a no-code tool that allows you to build powerful automations, and our official integration allows you to connect your Ghost site to more than 1,000 external services.

Example: When someone new subscribes to a newsletter on a Ghost site (Trigger) then the contact information is automatically pushed into MailChimp (Action).

Here's a few of the most popular automation templates:

Custom integrations

For more advanced automation, it's possible to create custom Ghost integrations with dedicated API keys from the Integrations page within Ghost Admin.

These custom integrations allow you to use the Ghost API without needing to write code, and create powerful workflows such as sending content from your favorite desktop editor into Ghost as a new draft.

Ghost comes with a best-in-class editor which does its very best to get out of the way, and let you focus on your content. Don't let its minimal looks fool you, though, beneath the surface lies a powerful editing toolset designed to accommodate the extensive needs of modern creators.

For many, the base canvas of the Ghost editor will feel familiar. You can start writing as you would expect, highlight content to access the toolbar you would expect, and generally use all of the keyboard shortcuts you would expect.

Our main focus in building the Ghost editor is to try and make as many things that you hope/expect might work: actually work.

• You can copy and paste raw content from web pages, and Ghost will do its best to correctly preserve the formatting.
• Pasting an image from your clipboard will upload inline.
• Pasting a social media URL will automatically create an embed.
• Highlight a word in the editor and paste a URL from your clipboard on top: Ghost will turn it into a link.
• You can also paste (or write!) Markdown and Ghost will usually be able to auto-convert it into fully editable, formatted content.

The goal, as much as possible, is for things to work so that you don't have to think so much about the editor. You won't find any disastrous "block builders" here, where you have to open 6 submenus and choose from 18 different but identical alignment options. That's not what Ghost is about.

What you will find though, is dynamic cards which allow you to embed rich media into your posts and create beautifully laid out stories.

Using cards

You can insert dynamic cards inside post content using the + button, which appears on new lines, or by typing / on a new line to trigger the card menu. Many of the choices are simple and intuitive, like bookmark cards, which allow you to create rich links with embedded structured data:

Open Subscription Platforms

A shared movement for independent subscription data.

Open Subscription Platforms

or embed cards which make it easy to insert content you want to share with your audience, from external services:

But, dig a little deeper, and you'll also find more advanced cards, like one that only shows up in email newsletters (great for personalized introductions) and a comprehensive set of specialized cards for different types of images and galleries.

Once you  start mixing text and image cards creatively, the whole narrative of the story changes. Suddenly, you're working in a new format.

As it turns out, sometimes pictures and a thousand words go together really well. Telling people a great story often has much more impact if they can feel, even for a moment, as though they were right there with you.

Galleries and image cards can be combined in so many different ways — the only limit is your imagination.

Build workflows with snippets

One of the most powerful features of the Ghost editor is the ability to create and re-use content snippets. If you've ever used an email client with a concept of saved replies then this will be immediately intuitive.

To create a snippet, select a piece of content in the editor that you'd like to re-use in future, then click on the snippet icon in the toolbar. Give your snippet a name, and you're all done. Now your snippet will be available from within the card menu, or you can search for it directly using the / command.

This works really well for saving images you might want to use often, like a company logo or team photo, links to resources you find yourself often linking to, or introductions and passages that you want to remember.

You can even build entire post templates or outlines to create a quick, re-usable workflow for publishing over time. Or build custom design elements for your post with an HTML card, and use a snippet to insert it.

Once you get a few useful snippets set up, it's difficult to go back to the old way of diving through media libraries and trawling for that one thing you know you used somewhere that one time.

Publishing and newsletters the easy way

When you're ready to publish, Ghost makes it as simple as possible to deliver your new post to all your existing members. Just hit the Preview link and you'll get a chance to see what your content looks like on Web, Mobile, Email and Social.

You can send yourself a test newsletter to make sure everything looks good in your email client, and then hit the Publish button to decide who to deliver it to.

Ghost comes with a streamlined, optimized email newsletter template that has settings built-in for you to customize the colors and typography. We've spent countless hours refining the template to make sure it works great across all email clients, and performs well for email deliverability.

So, you don't need to fight the awful process of building a custom email template from scratch. It's all done already!

The Ghost editor is powerful enough to do whatever you want it to do. With a little exploration, you'll be up and running in no time.

Welcome, it's great to have you here.

We know that first impressions are important, so we've populated your new site with some initial getting started posts that will help you get familiar with everything in no time. This is the first one!

A few things you should know upfront:

1. Ghost is designed for ambitious, professional publishers who want to actively build a business around their content. That's who it works best for.
2. The entire platform can be modified and customised to suit your needs. It's very powerful, but does require some knowledge of code. Ghost is not necessarily a good platform for beginners or people who just want a simple personal blog.
3. For the best experience we recommend downloading the Ghost Desktop App for your computer, which is the best way to access your Ghost site on a desktop device.

Ghost is made by an independent non-profit organisation called the Ghost Foundation. We are 100% self funded by revenue from our Ghost(Pro) service, and every penny we make is re-invested into funding further development of free, open source technology for modern publishing.

The version of Ghost you are looking at right now would not have been made possible without generous contributions from the open source community.

Next up, the editor

The main thing you'll want to read about next is probably: the Ghost editor. This is where the good stuff happens.

By the way, once you're done reading, you can simply delete the default Ghost user from your team to remove all of these introductory posts!

Ghost comes with a beautiful default theme called Casper, which is designed to be a clean, readable publication layout and can be adapted for most purposes. However, Ghost can also be completely themed to suit your needs. Rather than just giving you a few basic settings which act as a poor proxy for code, we just let you write code.

There are a huge range of both free and premium pre-built themes which you can get from the Ghost Theme Marketplace, or you can create your own from scratch.

Ghost themes are written with a templating language called handlebars, which has a set of dynamic helpers to insert your data into template files. For example: {{author.name}} outputs the name of the current author.

The best way to learn how to write your own Ghost theme is to have a look at the source code for Casper, which is heavily commented and should give you a sense of how everything fits together.

• default.hbs is the main template file, all contexts will load inside this file unless specifically told to use a different template.
• post.hbs is the file used in the context of viewing a post.
• index.hbs is the file used in the context of viewing the home page.
• and so on

We've got full and extensive theme documentation which outlines every template file, context and helper that you can use.

If you want to chat with other people making Ghost themes to get any advice or help, there's also a themes section on our public Ghost forum.

There are a couple of things to do next while you're getting set up:

Make your site private

If you've got a publication that you don't want the world to see yet because it's not ready to launch, you can hide your Ghost site behind a basic shared pass-phrase.

You can toggle this preference on at the bottom of Ghost's General Settings:

Ghost will give you a short, randomly generated pass-phrase which you can share with anyone who needs access to the site while you're working on it. While this setting is enabled, all search engine optimisation features will be switched off to help keep your site under the radar.

Do remember though, this is not secure authentication. You shouldn't rely on this feature for protecting important private data. It's just a simple, shared pass-phrase for some very basic privacy.

Invite your team

Ghost has a number of different user roles for your team:

Contributors
This is the base user level in Ghost. Contributors can create and edit their own draft posts, but they are unable to edit drafts of others or publish posts. Contributors are untrusted users with the most basic access to your publication.

Authors
Authors are the 2nd user level in Ghost. Authors can write, edit  and publish their own posts. Authors are trusted users. If you don't trust users to be allowed to publish their own posts, they should be set as Contributors.

Editors
Editors are the 3rd user level in Ghost. Editors can do everything that an Author can do, but they can also edit and publish the posts of others - as well as their own. Editors can also invite new Contributors+Authors to the site.

Administrators
The top user level in Ghost is Administrator. Again, administrators can do everything that Authors and Editors can do, but they can also edit all site settings and data, not just content. Additionally, administrators have full access to invite, manage or remove any other user of the site.

The Owner
There is only ever one owner of a Ghost site. The owner is a special user which has all the same permissions as an Administrator, but with two exceptions: The Owner can never be deleted. And in some circumstances the owner will have access to additional special settings if applicable. For example: billing details, if using Ghost(Pro).

It's a good idea to ask all of your users to fill out their user profiles, including bio and social links. These will populate rich structured data for posts and generally create more opportunities for themes to fully populate their design.

Next up: Organising your content