I shifted a large 20+ year news publication from Wordpress to ghost about 18 months ago - and opted to use Ghost(Pro)
It’s been a dream. The core product for that site is a daily newsletter. On ghost it gets higher opens rates and more engagement than via the previous email backend. Build is far simpler too.
The clincher for me for Ghost(Pro) is that if you use your own hosted version of Ghost you need to plug into something else for sending email newsletters - which for the number of subscribers in this instance for a daily newsletter plus weekly wrap-up would cost a fortune. With Ghost(Pro) it’s all wrapped in. And their support is superb.
On the off chance that someone here has recommendations, I'll reply and say my experience with Ghost Pro was different. I am trying to start a small blog that will have a handful of writers, so the idea of using some kind of lightweight CMS with edit/post capability is appealing, but we don't like the clunky feeling of beefy CMSs, especially when it seems to be built entirely around the analytics, which we do not care all that much about (the blog is intended to be small and hobbiest, we are not interested in making money from it).
I found Ghost to be too "on rails" and much more robust than what we need, so it felt like paying for software that sat mostly unused. In my admittedly unskilled experience (I am learning webdev, but not anywhere close to a pro, yet) it felt like I was using WordPress with a different name, which was a turn off.
I have Drupal 11 spun up on VPS but I have not had a moment to sit down and start really digging into it, yet. If anyone has some smaller CMS to recommend (even paid is fine, if the prices is reasonable) that allows for a nice WYSIWYG editor, user accounts and roles, code editor when needed, I'd love to try it.
Honestly, you’re actually not going to find much better for a simple multi-user setup than Ghost. It may have a lot of features built around newsletters and analytics that you’re not using, but the thing is, they’re there because it’s essentially throwing you the package it thinks will benefit most users, rather than forcing you to choose a bunch of plugins. If it feels overkill, that’s only because they wanted to cover the broadest use cases, rather than forcing users to decide on a package of 30 plugins, by a myriad number of developers.
I have used a lot of CMS platforms and I think you will find the complexity actually goes up from Ghost in most cases. (And if simplicity is your goal … you’re not going to find that with Drupal, which is extremely enterprise-oriented these days.)
If you think you’re getting overcharged for it, I’d recommend looking into self-hosting. Ghost is an extremely easy piece of software to run in a Docker instance on a shoebox somewhere. I do it myself for a couple of small sites. It’s really not that bad.
You've convinced me to give it another shot. Another commenter also pointed out Drupal's complexities, which I should have realized, in retrospect.
I am also looking at October, which sounds like it checks some of my boxes, but we'll see. Thankfully, there is no time-table for this project, so I can try a few things out before we settle.
I gave October a pretty serious look about five or six years ago. I like the fact that you can code in the interface, which can feel more friendly than competing platforms. But I thought the community hadn’t reached a level of scale that I thought was enough that I could trust it.
Also, I know that you have said you’re willing to pay and you’re not necessarily looking for FOSS, but I will point out there was some licensing drama with October a few years ago that led to a full-on fork: https://wintercms.com/blog/post/we-have-forked-october-cms
Had no idea about the drama surrounding October. Thank you for the recommendations. Kirby looks nice, as well, at first glance.
Will be trying both Winter and Kirby this weekend. I am really struggling getting Ghost up and running properly (LEMP stack). It seems to install fine, but breaks my nginx config so when I go to access the admin page (https://<my.domain>/ghost/) I get a 404 error.
Ghost is Node-based, so no PHP. (Shouldn’t functionally matter much as it’s designed in a way that you don’t need to mess in the code once you have everything set.) Not sure about your install process, but make sure your routes.yaml is properly set:
Drupal makes me cry. And as other folk here have said, just stick ghost on your own host. I have a dev version running on a raspberry pi on my desk so that I can test ideas locally. Obviously I could have done that on my mac, but I just wanted to see what would happen and it's fine. You could probably run a live site off it no problem, so long as it wasn't heavily trafficked.
It’s been a dream. The core product for that site is a daily newsletter. On ghost it gets higher opens rates and more engagement than via the previous email backend. Build is far simpler too.
The clincher for me for Ghost(Pro) is that if you use your own hosted version of Ghost you need to plug into something else for sending email newsletters - which for the number of subscribers in this instance for a daily newsletter plus weekly wrap-up would cost a fortune. With Ghost(Pro) it’s all wrapped in. And their support is superb.