User:Johnonolan/sandbox

Ghost is a free and open source blogging blogging platform written in JavaScript and distributed under the MIT License, designed to simplify the process of online publishing for individual bloggers as well as online publications.

The project was founded by John O'Nolan and Hannah Wolfe after successfully raising £196,362 from a successful crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter. To date, it is the 3rd most funded Open Software project of all time on the Kickstarter website. The first version of the software was released on September 19th, 2013. The project is maintained by a Nonprofit organization called the Ghost Foundation.

Features
Ghost contains a feature set focused heavily around the online writing and publishing experience.

Post Editing
The post editor within Ghost uses Markdown with a live preview pane. Allowing authors to simultaneously author and format content with a real time view of how it will appear on their public-facing blog. In addition, user friendly extensions are included inline - such as a drag and drop image uploader.

Themes
Themes in Ghost are created with the Handlebars.js logicless templating language, allowing users to create multiple designs for their Ghost blog with relative ease. There is already a large database of free and paid themes available on the Ghost Marketplace.

Speed
Ghost is built on top of the Node.js server-side JavaScript library, which allows for significant performance gains when running a blog. Independent tests found early versions of Ghost to be up to 1,900% faster than alternatives built on a traditional PHP stack.

Database Abstraction
Ghost ships with the SQLite database by default, allowing users to get a Ghost blog up and running with minimal environment setup requirements. The platform also includes an ORM layer to allow support for other types of database beyond the default. At present this includes MySQL and PostgreSQL via the Bookshelf library.

History
The idea for the Ghost platform was first written about at the start of November 2012 in a blog post by project founder John O'Nolan, the former deputy lead for the WordPress User Interface team , after becoming frustrated with the complexity of using WordPress as a blog rather than a content management system.

Following considerable demand and positive feedback from the community  on the initial blog post, O'Nolan recruited long-time friend Hannah Wolfe to help him create an initial prototype of the platform.

On April 29th, 2013 - O'Nolan released a video of the prototype in a crowdfunding campaign on Kickstarter with a goal of £25,000 to fund the completion of initial development work. The project was successfully funded in 11 hours and went on to raise a final total of £196,362 during the 29 day campaign. The project relied of backing both from individuals as well as sponsorship from companies who had an interest in seeing the platform succeed. Notable backers included Seth Godin, Leo Babauta, Darren Rowse, Tucker Max, major companies such as WooThemes, Envato and Microsoft.

On September 19th, 2013 - The first public version of Ghost was released, named Kerouac as an early release to people who had backed the Kickstarter campaign.

On October 14th, 2013 - Ghost was made available for the first time as an extended release to the general public via Github as version 0.3.3 - amended with bugfixes and security updates.

Releases
Main releases of Ghost are named after authors with historical significance.

Ghost Foundation
The Ghost project is managed by a Nonprofit organization based in the UK called the Ghost Foundation, which was established following the successful Kickstarter campaign. The foundation currently employs 4 full time members of staff to work on the Ghost project and the community infrastructure surrounding it.

Hosted Platform
Ghost offers a (paid) hosted platform for users who would like to run a live blog on the internet, as an alternative to configuring a server and running a manual install of the software package. For a monthly fee, users receive an account with fully managed Ghost blogs with automatic backups and updates as well as email support. As the hosted platform is owned and operated by the Ghost Foundation, all revenue generated from the service is subsequently used to fund further development of the Open Source software and the project's infrastructure.

Community
The Ghost project is developed publicly on GitHub where anyone can get involved to help submit bug reports, translations, code, or simply suggestions to the Ghost repository. An extensive set of documentation is also maintained, and there are public newsletters, support forums, and a development IRC channel on Freenode.