Ghost launches as publishing platform with writers in mind

Ghost, an open source publishing platform "designed for writers rather than developers", launches today after successful funding through Kickstarter.

The code is available to download for free from the Ghost website or the GitHub repository for users to install, and the hosted service will be made publicly available in January 2014.

"Once our hosted service launches in the next couple of weeks to Kickstarter backers, and the next couple of months publicly, we'll have a system to set up a new blog in one or two clicks," John O'Nolan, founder of Ghost, told Journalism.co.uk, "and that's when it starts becoming really friendly for writers."

Users will have to pay for the hosted service when it is launched but, as a not-for-profit organisation, O'Nolan said 100 per cent of the profit generated will be invested into the platform to improve it.

In designing the platform for writers, Ghost uses Markdown, a simple formatting language, and displays the code and finished page side by side.

"Primarily, it's a really simple and user-friendly user interface and writing interface that is designed to appeal more to writers than people who are building websites," O'Nolan said, "where you might have lots of different kinds of content.

"Our focus is mainly on the written word and how that applies to articles, so blogs and magazines and news websites. "

O'Nolan initially hoped to raise £25,000 for the project through a Kickstarter campaign in April but received almost £250,000 in funding from backers, allowing him to start a sustainable company and infrastructure around the platform.

Ghost was built by O'Nolan and a team of developers from around the world through GitHub and he hopes that, with the extra funding, the team will be able to expand on the platform to make it "useful, usable and accessible" for future iterations for larger organisations as well as bloggers.

Technical information about installing Ghost can be found on the company's blog and Journalism.co.uk wrote about the user-facing aspects of the platform in May.

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