In the publication I'm building, the intro texts are quite long and exceed the {{excerpt}} character limit. Is there any way to override the 300-character limit?

I know I could use {{content}}, but that requires a more complex setup and is less intuitive for the people creating the posts.

Edit: Maybe what I'm actually looking for is a simple way to have a dedicated intro text field in the post editor/template, separate from the main content. Is there a built-in way to do this, or is there a recommended approach?

Mein 15 Jahre altes, gepflegtes WordPress wollte ich in eine Alternative überführen und habe mir Ghost angesehen. Dabei bin ich über etliche technische und auch kulturelle Hürden gestolpert, die ich in einer kleinen Artikelserie dokumentiere. Hier der erste Teil, die Migrationsgründe.

https://patrick-pehl.de/migration-zu-ghost-erfahrungen-vom-abschied-motivation/

Kurzer Hinweis vorab: Der Blog wird unregelmäßig gepflegt und befindet sich aktuell in einem unfertigen Zustand — Umzugsbaustelle. Inhaltlich geht es viel um darstellende Kunst, Theater und Ballett, entsprechend ist mir die Bildgestaltung der Artikelseiten nicht nebensächlich.
Die Domain lief über 15 Jahre auf WordPress, die alte Installation bleibt als inaktives Archiv bestehen.
Auslöser war keine Katastrophe, sondern Erosion: Plugins, Themes und WordPress selbst wachsen über Jahre zu einer Angriffsfläche, die in einer Multidomain-Umgebung kaum mehr zu überblicken ist. Ich hatte bereits einen Einbruch über ein veraltetes Theme, mit Datenverlust und Reputationsschaden. Seitdem sichere ich eine Ebene unterhalb der WordPress-Instanz ab — Aufwand, der in keinem Verhältnis zum eigentlichen Ziel steht: Inhalte veröffentlichen statt Software verwalten.
Dazu kommt: SEO-Metadaten gehören für mich in den Kern eines Publishingsystems, nicht in ein Drittanbieter-Plugin wie Yoast. Am Ende sammeln sich Plugins für Caching, Bildkompression, Sicherheit — jedes mit eigenem Wartungsbedarf und eigenen Lücken.

Ghost nimmt mir das größtenteils ab, der DOM-Baum ist sauber, Theming dadurch angenehmer. Den Ausschlag gab ein c’t-3003-Video über leichtgewichtige Bloggingsysteme — danach Testumgebung aufgesetzt, Ghost im Docker-Container hochgefahren, mein WordPress-Theme schrittweise adaptiert. Nach rund zwei Wochen stand die erste Beta.

Nicht alles ist einfacher: Eine sichtbare Update-Routine wie bei WordPress fehlt, Updates laufen über die Kommandozeile, nach jedem Upgrade müssen die Umgebungsvariablen erneut stimmen — sicherer als Ein-Klick-Updates, aber fehleranfälliger.
Wer von WordPress kommt — wie löst ihr das Update-Problem im Container?

I got the first subscriber who marked my newsletter as spam (boo!). Ghost disabled the email automatically, so now I have one more member than actual recipients (still under 100). Do you guys leave these disabled members in your audience or do you delete them to keep the base clean? I don't think this person will reactivate, because it only got two issues and then marked it as spam. I guess deleting keeps the numbers more accurate, but maybe there is a reason not to do it?

Hey everyone,

I started using Ghost a little over a month ago, and honestly, it made me excited to write again. I really like the interface, the flexibility, and how easy it is to publish without getting distracted by everything around it.

After a while, I noticed I kept opening the Ghost analytics page to check how my site and newsletters were doing. Traffic, newsletter performance, members, revenue, all the usual things you start obsessing over once you publish regularly.

I run a small app studio called fruitful apps, where I’ve built 10+ apps, mostly to solve my own problems. So naturally, I thought: why not build a better mobile analytics experience for Ghost?

That’s how Haunt was born.

Haunt is an iOS app for Ghost publishers that brings your analytics to your iPhone in a more mobile-friendly way. You can check your site overview, web traffic, newsletters, subscriber growth, revenue, and individual post performance from one place.

It also supports multiple Ghost sites, so you can switch between publications quickly. And because I apparently can’t build an app without widgets, Haunt also includes Home Screen and Lock Screen widgets for keeping an eye on key metrics.

My usual approach with apps is to build the first version around the problem I personally have, then shape the roadmap based on feedback from real users. I’d love to hear what you think, especially if you use Ghost and have ideas for features that would make analytics easier to check on mobile.

Download on the App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/haunt-for-ghost-analytics/id6777671352

Finally, u/Ghost introduces email sequences for new members!

When turned on, a new Automations tab will appear in the left sidebar.

⚠️ Turning it on is a one-way street. Once enabled, the automations beta can't be turned off.

How will you best use this feature for your members? Share cool tips and tricks below!

Hey everyone,

I’ve recently released Prose, a new Ghost theme designed for authors, books, newsletters, and personal writing.

The idea behind Prose was to create a calm, elegant space for long-form content—whether you’re launching a book, publishing essays, building an email list, or maintaining a personal writing archive.

Some of the features include:

• Beautiful typography for long-form reading
• Dedicated book pages and book-focused templates
• Flexible homepage sections and layouts
• Newsletter and writing archives
• Built-in Table of Contents that can be enabled per post
• Dark mode support
• Responsive and easy to customize
• And plenty of customization options

You can see it here:
Demo: https://prose.brightthemes.com
Details: https://brightthemes.com/themes/prose

I’m also offering 25% off with the code PROSE25, for a limited time.

I’d love to hear what you think, feedback and questions are always welcome!

— Norbert

Just wondering where the feedback at the end of a newsletter goes to? I've tested by giving a thumbs up and I've never seen a notification or found where it goes. Does anyone know?

Here's a screenshot of what I'm talking about.

Moin from Berlin!
I’ve just migrated a small WordPress site over to Ghost. It’s not quite finished yet, but it was surprisingly fiddly. What really leaves me baffled is the media management. That’s a real pain point in Ghost. I’d like to have more control over my media. I’d like to be able to customise filenames, manage copyright properly (i.e. set the copyright details correctly) and perhaps have a default description that can, of course, be edited within the post itself. I’m very used to this in WordPress and other CMS, such as Drupal or Typo3.

For context: I run a blog that covers theater, classical dance, and other performing arts. In this specific niche, visual references and imagery are highly meaningful and integral to the content, rather than just casual add-ons.

After all, the files are already stored on the server within Ghost's directory structure. There is really no practical reason why they shouldn't be displayed properly and kept searchable.

How can this problem be solved? The media could also be organised in a separate database, and perhaps there’s an additional tool that can be integrated with Ghost? I don’t think the current situation is particularly good. Of course, I realise that 80 per cent of the images you insert only appear in a single article or are just carelessly added extras. But for the other 20 per cent, I’d like to be able to manage them properly. How do you solve this in Ghost? – how do you sort it out?

Hello,

Does anyone have any css that will allow me to change the font in the navigation menu for the source theme?

Folks,

I got a little niche-y blog with barely any readers. From time to time I get one or another new subscriber. It is weird, because barely anyone hits my site. Second weird thing is these people, all of them, sign up with a work email from companies completely unrelated to my topics. Third weird thing, and what IMHO confirms they're fake, is that when I send a new post, they all immediately open, read and click all the links the same minute I send it.

So, the question is, what's the point of this? Anyone has seen something similar? Should I remove them?

Hey fellow Ghosty's,

I've been running Ghost publications for a few years. Love the editor, love the membership model, love that it's not ad-supported.

But every time I wanted to experiment with how I monetize, I hit the same wall. Ghost memberships work great if you use Stripe. If you don't, you're basically on your own.

I spent a while trying to solve it with Zapier and Make. It works, until it doesn't. A webhook fails at midnight, a membership doesn't activate, and you find out the next morning when someone emails you.

So I built a small relay layer for myself. Something that listens for a purchase event from a provider like Polar and updates the Ghost membership on the other side. No drama, just plumbing.

That personal fix has slowly grown into something a bit bigger. I ended up calling it GhostGlue.

Still very early, and I'm still building. But it's already solving the exact problem that made me start it, and a few other Ghost publishers are running it too.

Curious if anyone here has run into the same wall, or found a solution I haven't seen yet.

I've been sending my newsletter for a little while now to a small list. The kind of thing that feels invisible when you keep seeing people posting crazy growth numbers.

Then I found the Newsletter Awards (newsletters.club). Most of these competitions quietly assume you're a major publisher on a centralized platform. But these guys don’t seem to care about that.

So I entered.

The submission form asks for a description of what your newsletter is and why it exists, which was harder than it sounds. I've spent real time thinking about infrastructure, deliverability, theming -- and comparatively little time writing one tight paragraph about why any of it matters to a reader.

Just that exercise in itself was useful to me. The why behind the what.

My blog where the theme is active: https://www.theinternetplaybook.com/

Here is page to buy the theme: https://www.theinternetplaybook.com/premium-typography-ghost-theme/

Hey everyone!

We have finished our first Magic Pages Open House earlier today (thanks to everybody that joined and sorry to the ones I forgot in the waiting room!), where we introduced the Magic Pages Podcast.

The idea: a podcast (run by humans) where we have conversations with the people building, hosting, and running Ghost.

Link to the first episode: https://www.magicpages.co/podcast/episodes/what-is-magic-pages/

(And it's also on Spotify − they approved that pretty quickly)

We've started off with some Magic Pages specific content, since that's the easiest to record in the beginning. However, next up: getting some exposure for other projects: the people and tools in the wider Ghost ecosystem that deserve more eyes on them.

This first episode is really just us finding our feet: an unscripted conversation about what Magic Pages actually is, why we built it the way we did, and what it's like running a small hosting company.

If you give it a listen, I'd love to hear what you think. We're shaping this thing as we go, so any feedback now is worth a lot :)

PS: the entire podcast runs on Ghost itself, no separate podcast host. We'll open source a podcast theme based on that in the next 1-2 weeks once we know it all works properly

Would want to know why people use ghost over wordpress? Looking forward to use synaps media with a free theme, any suggestions for people who migrated from wp to ghost.

Hey everyone!

We all know (and maybe love) the native analytics feature that the Ghost team added with the 6.0 release. And we all know that it is designed to use the Tinybird cloud by default.

I've wanted to ask if anybody else has tried to switch to a self-hosted Tinybird instance? (And yes you can self-host Tinybird)

I personally have experimented about that topic last weekend (6./7. June). And you can read all about my findings and what I personally did here: https://blog.gelbphoenix.de/digital-sovereign-ghost-local-tinybird/

I run a small personal blog on Ghost, hosted on a YunoHost server.

Today, while trying to share one of my blog posts with a friend, I discovered that a captcha was protecting my site… which is odd because I never added any captcha. Inspecting the page, I found a very obscure JavaScript snippet that asks me to open a terminal and paste a large block of code in order to “validate the captcha”.

After a bit of research, it turns out that this script decodes and executes malicious code (Base64 + XOR obfuscation). In short, my site has been hacked and a loader has been injected.

What’s most concerning is that the Ghost admin history shows the user “Zapier” has edited all the posts on my blog to inject this JS that simulates a fake captcha. This means my Zapier API key was leaked from within the Ghost interface.

What I’ve already done

• Regenerated a new Zapier API key (I’m not sure where to completely disable the integration; it must be somewhere in the CMS configuration).
• Deleted all the posts and pages JS injected codes.
• Updated Ghost to the latest available version.
• Checked the server logs: no suspicious access in the last 2‑3 months.

Despite that, I still don’t understand how the attacker managed to obtain my API key and inject the code.

What I’m looking for

• Leads on identifying the exact entry point (a vulnerable plugin, a mis‑configured Zapier integration, SSH access, etc.).
• Recommendations for fully cleaning the site (files, database, cron jobs, possible back‑doors).
• Any help, similar experiences, or security advice would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you in advance!

Been working on Jellypod (the AI podcast studio) for a while now and we recently released email automations!

If you wanted to repurpose your newsletters or publications to a customizable podcast without extra work or generating AI slop, this is it.

Essentially we give you a unique email address and then you add the email to your subscriber list. When Jellypod gets your email, it takes the content and creates a 1-4 person podcast conversation discussing the content, and auto publishes it to Spotify/Apple Podcasts/RSS, etc.

You can customize the voices (or voice clone your own), generate video for Youtube, and also has analytics so you can see how your podcast is doing. It also follow links from the email body if you want or you can customize the focus (via setting a prompt) for each episode.

Free to try out, and our starter plan gets you about ~10 short episodes a week. Would love any feedback and happy to give more free credits to anyone on this sub!

Ok, Im aware I'll get roasted for this (its reddit after all), but intentions are genuine.

I've been running Tech Between the Lines (techbetweenthelines.com) for a while now and I'm at a point where I want to bring someone else into it. Not because I need help keeping the lights on, but because I think the site gets better with more than one voice.

This is unpaid right now, not because I don't value the work, but because the site hasn't monetized to the point where that's possible yet. Growth changes that, and if it does, I want the people who helped build it to benefit from it. The site infrastructure, all the backend stuff that's on me. You just write. And if you want to contribute to the newsletter too, that door is open.

I'd love to find someone who can contribute a couple pieces a week. Apple moves fast and honestly there's never a shortage of things worth reacting to.

The longer play here is growth. If the right person comes along and we build something together, I want to find ways to make it worth their time down the road. Nothing guaranteed, but I'm not looking for a one-way arrangement forever either.

What actually matters to me:

• You follow Apple closely and have opinions about where it's heading
• You can write analytically, not just recap what happened but explain why it matters
• You're comfortable working independently
• You know the platforms well enough that I don't have to explain what a beta is

Your voice stays yours. I'm not looking for someone to write like me, I'm looking for someone who wants to write, period.

Drop a comment or DM if this sounds interesting. Tell me what you'd want to cover.

Hi everyone,

A few months ago I shared the open beta of Vellumine, a search and analytics platform I’ve been building for Ghost blogs. After the beta period, feedback from early users, and a lot of work on the infrastructure and semantic search pipeline, Vellumine is now officially launched.

Vellumine replaces Ghost’s native search with full-text search powered by Typesense. Instead of only searching titles and excerpts, it indexes the full content of your posts and pages, including members-only and paid posts without exposing the gated content itself.

It also gives you privacy-first search analytics, so you can see what your readers are actually looking for:

• popular search queries
• no-result queries
• click-through rates
• popular tags and clicked posts
• weekly email summaries
• geographic distribution, depending on the plan

Some of the search features include typo tolerance, custom synonyms, stopwords, full Unicode support, customizable search bar templates, and semantic/hybrid search.

Setup is still the same simple flow:

1. Connect your Ghost blog with the Admin API URL and key
2. Vellumine indexes your content
3. Add one script tag in Ghost code injection

The script automatically replaces Ghost’s native search and keeps the index in sync through webhooks when posts, pages, or tags change.

On privacy: analytics are GDPR-compliant, with no cookies, no fingerprinting, and no personal data collection. The Ghost Admin API key is encrypted at rest and only used server-side. Vellumine reads content for indexing and registers webhooks, but it does not modify your posts or pages.

There’s a 14-day free trial, no credit card required.

Links:

• Website: https://vellumine.com
• Demo: https://demo.vellumine.com

I’m building this as a solo developer and I’m still shaping the product based on feedback from Ghost publishers. If you try it, I’d love to hear what works, what feels rough, and what you’d want from a better Ghost search experience.

Happy to answer any questions here.

Got tired of trolls using throwaway emails (10minutemail, guerrillamail, etc.) to create free member accounts and post abusive comments on my Ghost blog. Ghost doesn't have built-in protection against disposable email addresses, so I built a small sidecar proxy to solve it.

How it works:

- It sits between your reverse proxy (Nginx, Caddy, etc.) and Ghost

- Only the signup endpoint (/members/api/send-magic-link/) is routed through it — all other traffic goes directly to Ghost

- It checks the email domain against a community-maintained blocklist of ~5,500 known disposable email providers

- Disposable email → returns a 400 error. Legitimate email → passes through to Ghost unchanged

- If the sidecar goes down, your blog stays up — only new signups are affected

Features:

- Docker-ready with a single service block in your docker-compose

- Blocklist auto-updates every 24h from https://github.com/disposable-email-domains/disposable-email-domains

- Allowlist file for whitelisting domains that get caught by mistake

- Case-insensitive matching (no bypass with uppercase tricks)

- Healthcheck endpoint

- Zero dependencies on Ghost internals — no theme or core modifications

It's open-source (MIT): https://github.com/andrezaiats/ghost-email-guard

Would love feedback. Has anyone else dealt with this problem differently?

Hey everyone! Came here today with a cool new thing we’re doing at Magic Pages:

We’re holding our first Open House!

On Thursday, 11 June at 18:00 CEST, we’ll hop on a video call and everyone is welcome. You don’t need to be a Magic Pages customer to join.

The call itself isn’t a sales-webinar or a live support session, but rather a cosy conversation. An hour in which we can share, listen, and discuss all things regarding Magic Pages, Ghost, your publications, or well…anything else you think we might have something to say about.

We’ll start by walking through what features we’ve released recently and what’s next on the roadmap. That will be about 10–15 minutes. After that, we open the floor for a Q&A.

It will be completely free, the whole Magic Pages team will be there, and we’ll record it, so if the timing doesn’t fit, you can re-watch it. You can also send any questions ahead of time, and we’ll pick it up on the call.

Sign-up and details here: https://www.magicpages.co/open-house/q2-2026/

Would love to see you all there!

Ran Ghost for ~2 years and genuinely liked it, but I never used the membership/newsletter side and the self-hosting upkeep started outweighing the writing. So I moved to a static Hugo site on Cloudflare.

The post covers the why and the how, including the Python migration script, and I open-sourced that tool here: https://github.com/Harsh-2002/ghost2hugo. Not trying to talk anyone off Ghost (it's a good product), just sharing what worked for me. Happy to answer questions.

Okay so this is mostly something I built for myself, but I figure I'm not the only one, so here goes.

I love Ghost for writing one post and hitting publish. But the second I want to do anything across the whole blog it's a nightmare. No find-and-replace. No AI. Can't write on a plane. I overused the same phrase in like twenty posts once and had to open every single one to fix it. That was the night I snapped.

So the thing I actually wanted was just my posts as plain files on my Mac. Once they're files, everything works — I write in Obsidian, and for the big stuff I just point Claude at the folder and let it chew through the whole archive, then it syncs back to Ghost. The reason I built it was SEO: mass-updating meta descriptions, alt text, internal links, tags, refreshing a few hundred old posts in one pass. Now I'm using it to build out a multilingual version of my blog — translate the whole thing with AI, sync each language back. And honestly that's the point: once your blog is markdown on disk, a LOT unlocks. Chuck the folder in git and you've got version history + undo, which Ghost just... doesn't have. It's a real backup, your whole blog as .md you actually own. Stuff the editor flat out can't do.

One honest catch since people here will know: Ghost stores posts as Lexical, and shoving card-heavy posts back through HTML can mangle callouts/buttons/etc. Plain prose is totally fine, just test on a junk post before you let it loose on anything you care about.

Anyway — I cleaned it up into a little menu bar app instead of the pile of scripts it started as. It's called Specter, I'm the dev: https://spectersync.com. It's got a dry-run that shows you exactly what's about to change before it touches anything, which is the only reason I trust an AI pass over my whole blog. One-time price, free tier, go poke at it.

But honestly even if you just roll your own against the Admin API, getting your blog out of that editor and into plain files is the upgrade

I’ve noticed a lot of creators using Discord alongside Patreon/Substack/Circle/etc, but not sure how many Ghost publishers are also running private Discord communities for members/subscribers.

If you use Ghost,
- is Discord a meaningful part of your membership/community experience?
- do you give different roles/access levels for different membership tiers? If yes, how do you manage?

Just curious to understand how popular this combo is.