I Like Ghost

Ghost.org and GreenMaps.us are very complimentary.  For a long time I have been looking for some software to manage campaigns.  Everyone recommends CivicCRM, but it is too complex.  Has 500! tables.   Ghost looks about right.

Out of the box, Ghost users can subscribe, they can pay for a newsletter.  You can also distribute it for free. Ghost has a ton of end-user integrations, so the end user can do a lot.  it does play nicely with other servers, I can host it at candidate.GreenMaps.US/blog

But Ghost also has its limitations. It only knows about Twitter and Facebook, no other social media platforms. It is not natively bilinugal.  It is okay for single campaign, but completely clueless about the rest of the Green Party.  it is really for a single user, or a small team.  Managing 200 Ghost servers would be a nightmare.   It has a lovely editor.  (Maybe not all the features are accessible).  I want to port the editor over to GreenMaps.  Not that hard to do.

Ghost is terrible from a development perspective.  Cannot edit templates in the Browser  To test template validity, basically I have to load up a whole Node.js development environment.

No easy way to extend the data model, to cover the other social media platforms.  To ask for volunteers, to ask for which caucuses a user should belong to.

There are really very few content types.  And no way to have multiple views on a content object.

Don’t get me wrong.  The power it gives the end user if fantastic.  I think a lot of people will love it. It is a big boost to GreenMaps.  it is a huge boost to candidates, and local parties.   Gets us a lot closer to where we should be, even if it does not exactly get us to where we would like to be.

I can see where this is going. Green_Maps will manage the whole model of the Green Party. Individual candidates or orgnizations can use Ghost to manage their web site, their newsletter and subscribers.