Ghost - A WordPress I’d Love to Use  

John O'Nolan has written his fictional, perfect idea for a writing-specific WordPress fork.

It’s an idea I can fully, 1000% support. As much as I like Svbtle (ignore my lack of updates, if you saw my calendar you’d not write on your personal blog either), something must be said for owning and controlling your own domain.

In a lot of ways, Ghost – which doesn’t yet exist, but I hope will – reminds me of Chyrp, which was originally going to be like a self-hosted Tumblr. The project is still around but it hasn’t amounted to anything.

Anyway, I love the idea of a small, lean, blogging/writing engine. It’s great that WordPress has finally become a viable CMS (although I’ll still take issue with putting it in the same league as systems like Drupal or Django, especially if you’re dealing with hundreds of thousands of blog entries and complex taxonomies), but as a result, the focus has disappeared from where it started, which was a simple, easy way for people to start publishing their own thoughts.

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.

Again, I like a lot of hosted systems. I’m using one to type this entry. But I also really love the idea of being able to control your own destiny.

I hope Ghost becomes a reality.