Someone posed this question on Reddit. 
Is it just me or is ghost still really hard to customize ?

Yes, it is difficult to customize. 

Ghost supports two different user interface models.  It is really easy for end users to publish content.  But if you want to change the templates, suddenly you make a very dramatic shift to being a fine system based developer.  You really have to already be a file-system developer.

You can't edit the templates in the browser.  To edit it on the file system, you have to install part of node, and if you want to iterate fast you have to install all of node.   That is like full on software development.   In fact i did it.  Could not install Node so first I had to install a npm version manager, then install node, then install ghost.  Give me a break.

End users should be able to tweak templates in the browser.

And then ghost templates are all in HTML.  Serious Node developers do their work in Pug.   Pug is like Python, it uses indentation to define structure, so it removes closing brackets and opening tags.  Makes it much easier to develop web pages.   But since I am not a full on node developer, I could not figure out how to use Pug.

And then you have this whole routes thing.  What a pain.  I even had routes where there was no content. It generated an error.   Much better to use computational model called traversal, and views on objects. And then if there is no object, well there is no route either.   

And then you really only have 1 content type. And you do not have any way to add fields to the content type.

"There is another way" Obi-wan misquoted. 

i do all of my template editing in the browser.  But the developers do not like my tools, because they want to be on the file system.  And the end users do not like my tools, because it is not a brand name.   So culturally we are stuck with Ghost templates being on the file system, and  being painful or impossible for end users to customize. Is there hope?  Yes.  I am starting to teach classes to Python students, it may be possible to get the young to think differently.  

 You can see the most recent version of this article here. There are three articles there.

https://greenmaps.us/ghost

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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