The Admin is the person responsible for configuring and managing Ghost.  Here are the problems they face.

A Beggar on Every Corner

Trying out Ghost was like visiting Bombay or San Francisco.  Every page has its hand out asking for money.  The first thing I wanted was a different theme.  When you go to configure the themes, there are no preinstalled themes waiting to be selected.  Instead there is a theme store. $$$  When I wanted to install Paypal for subscriptions,  they do not support Paypal callbacks.  Instead I need to use Zapier.  Don't get me wrong, Zapier is great,  but I would like to be  hosting a large number of Ghost servers, and to configure Zapier for all of them is a huge amount of additional work.    I can understand why Ghost Inc did this.  They are based in very expensive Singapore, they have to make money however they can.  In general I find that the companies based in less expensive countries offer better value propositions. 

You Need a Developer

There are a lot of themes for Ghost, but I could not find one that did what I wanted.  And my needs were not that complex.  A photo on the left hand side and a single editable article on the home page.  To develop my own theme, I had to be a developer.  Download a theme edit it on the file system, and then install node tools to validate.  Better yet install all of node, and your own local Ghost server.    

Say you want to just edit your page footer.  There are so many WYSIWYG browser-based editors, it should be really trivial to edit the footer in the Browser. 

No Drop Down Menus

Ghost just supports a flat list of menu options.  The admin cannot configure drop down menus.  You need a developer to add drop down menus, but then  you cannot edit them. 

The Missing Page Bug

The template I built requires a default home page.  If your website does not have that page, then the landing page yields a cryptic error message.  Maybe someone smarter than me can fix this bug.  But at a deeper level, the page should reference the template, not the template reference the page. 
Then multiple pages can share the same template.  Another conceptual limitation. 

It is all caused by the relational database.  They do not have a tree of objects, so they need to specify routes to pages.  And then if the page does not exist, there is trouble.  Much better to have a tree of content objects, each of which specifies its template.  If the page is missing, no one refers to it.  And of course the root page, the home page, always exists by default. 

Alternatives

I think that Ghost is way better than Substack, or Revue . You can create and manage your whole website.   Revue is better at importing content, but Revue does not let you build a web site.  And  do you trust Twitter?   If you want a blogging platform without all of these problems, please check out the Forest Wiki.

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