Ghost 1.0 & LTS

Exactly 3 years ago to the day, we released the very first version of Ghost (v0.3) to Kickstarter backers. It was basic and it was flawed in many ways, but it was beautiful and it got us to where we are now. Today, we're announcing a huge milestone of Ghost v1.0-alpha, and Ghost v0.11-LTS.

This represents the end of the road for the first development cycle of Ghost. We've achieved almost everything we set out to build from the early days, and now it's time to embark on a new (SemVer-compliant) adventure.

So how's this all going to work?

Ghost 0.11-LTS

Starting from today, Ghost 0.11 is our official Long Term Support (LTS) branch. We'll keep shipping bug fixes and security patches for Ghost 0.11.0 for the next 6 months, officially dropping support on the 20th of March 2017.

Meanwhile...

Ghost 1.0

We're starting work on Ghost 1.0, which is currently in alpha state, and will be heavily developed over the next couple of months toward a first official release. There are going to be some major changes, including...

A totally overhauled install+update process with an official Ghost-CLI and a configuration system based on nconf, supporting files, env vars and cli flags. It's going to be more awesome than kittens with lasers, and will enable us to build 1-click updates right into Ghost.

An official Ghost OAuth login system. You will have 1 login which gives you global access to all of your Ghost blogs, no matter where they're hosted. We'll also be able to add 2-factor auth, and all sorts of things which we couldn't do previously to streamline the user experience.

A brand new Ghost editor, which will be fully extensible and an enormous leap forward from our beloved (but somewhat long-in-the-tooth) Markdown editor. The writing experience is going to be dramatically better!

Behind these changes will be a full rewrite of our database model and a new focus on optimising for MySQL as the default production env. We'll be making huge improvements to how themes are installed and managed and we're also going to rebuild all of our tooling to make theme creation and contribution much easier again.

As you can imagine, it would be tough to make these big changes without breaking things, so we're also announcing that Ghost 1.0 will not be backwards compatible and releases from this point onwards will be fully SemVer compliant.

Over the coming weeks, we will be sharing more details of what's to come. It's going to be an exciting couple of months! If you're interested in contributing, we'd love some help.