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Fair Warning on Publishing to Ghost from Craft

Posted by Matt Birchler
β€” 1 min read

I made a video last week about the developer preview for Craft extensions, and one of the things I showed was possible in that vide was publishing from Craft. Now while this is possible, the "developer preview" tag Craft puts on the page is absolutely legit, and I would not recommend most people publish this way just yet.

Issues

The main issue is lack of control. You can open any note in Craft and share it to Ghost or Medium (I'm only covering Ghost here since I don't use Medium), and you'll see your formatted text and images all go over to your blog like you'd expect, but there are some caveats:

  1. Things like block-quotes get sent as plain text, so link posts won't really work. There may be other styling issues, but I haven't tried every HTML thing possible.
  2. There are no tags in Craft, and likewise there is no way to add tags to your post either.
  3. You can't publish as a draft.
  4. You can't schedule a post for later.
  5. You can include images inline, but you can't include a featured image (Ghost themes usually treat those differently).
  6. You can't use a custom URL.
  7. You can't include an excerpt.

Additionally, and this is more a me thing, Craft will publish your post as a single Markdown block on your blog, not using Ghost's native elements. This more a detail no one else will notice, but it's something worth mentioning.

It's a Preview

Again, this is clearly labeled a developer preview, and these extensions were largely created to show what can be done with the platform. I'd expect these to either get updated before the official release, or to see more full-featured options crop up from third party developers (or even Ghost themselves). I'll continue to do my writing in Ulysses, but Craft certainly has my attention here.