It's been almost 6 months since I switched this site from WordPress to Ghost. It was the first platform change I had made in like 5 years, and it was a non-trivial task that worked out in the end, but had some turbulence along the way. I chronicled the transition here, if you were curious to see how that went. Today I'm interested in telling you how it's been using Ghost for the past 6 months.

In a word: great!

There have been literally zero days where I wished I was still on WordPress, which in all honesty is less than I expected. I was really expecting to have some times where I wished I could do a thing that I did in WordPress, but it really hasn't happened. I'm not someone who ever used nearly all the tools available to to me in WP, so the fact all that advanced stuff is gone simply makes using Ghost feel like a more focused experience.

And the blogging tools here are really excellent! Everything is lightning quick and looks beautiful. Seriously, the admin interface in Ghost is super nice! It's so good that I even find myself writing some posts (like this one) there instead of in Ulysses and then publishing to my site. I never did that in WordPress because their editor was either too clinical (legacy) or made me feel like I was losing too much control (Guternberg). Ghost's editor lets me write like I'm in a standard rich text editor, but it also lets me switch over to Markdown or HTML in the middle of a post, and that's really powerful for me.

I also like that Ghost is a JavaScript-based app and not PHP-based. I know PHP pretty well and can get pretty much whatever I want with it, which made modifying WordPress second nature to me, but as someone who spend more time using the admin UI rather than tweaking it, I really appreciate Ghost's single page application qualities. Moving from page to page is instantaneous and everything feels more dynamic to me. I never feel like I'm waiting for the app to do something, which is the sign of a good tool.

This isn't a full review or overview of features, so I'm going to leave it there. The short story here is that I'm super happy with my decision to change platforms at the end of 2019. The transition had some challenges, but it was a worthwhile move for me.