Following Ghost 1.0.0-beta.1 a couple of weeks ago, today we're releasing Ghost 1.0.0-beta.2 - which is the next step towards a final release. We're anticipating that this will be the last beta, and the next package to be built will be a release-candidate.

Since the first beta, a significant number of bugs have been found and fixed:

  • [fixed] ghost uninstall won't screw up your instance list
  • [fixed] local process manager won't die if your .ghostpid file has gone away
  • [fixed] Casper is now updated during ghost update
  • [improved] Commands that require sudo are shown in gray before they are run (future improvement will be to prompt)
  • [fixed] Remove trailing slash for {{@blog.url}}
  • [improved] Theme activation error messages
  • [changed] Enable public API by default
  • [changed] set spellchecker to "off" by default

You can see the full change log for the details of all changes included in this release.

A new CLI release

We've also released a new version of Ghost-CLI — 1.0.0-alpha.19. You can update by running npm install -g ghost-cli@latest. This includes and important fix so that the Casper theme is updated during ghost update.

Casper 2.0

Ghost 1.0.0-beta.2 also contains the most-visible change of the upcoming release, which is a brand new default theme.

Casper was originally designed for the functionality of Ghost 0.3, and as Ghost has grown and had new features added to it - those features have been tacked-on to the original design as an afterthought. Now, 4 years later, Casper has had a total rewrite to natively support all of the features which Ghost has in 2017.

We'll talk more about this in the full release post, but from a developer perpective the relevant changes are:

  • More performant, cleaner use of handlebars
  • Significantly more inline code documentation to help new Ghost theme developers understand how our theme API works
  • Gulp + PostCSS now used to build and minify theme assets
  • New use of the {{#get}} helper to pull content from the API (which is now switched-on by default)
  • Proper support for Ghost's subscribers (beta) feature
  • Better handling of RSS feeds via Feedly, rather than raw XML
  • Better author meta data with extended use of new social profile fields
  • Google fonts replaced with system fonts
  • Icon font replaced with inline SVG icons
  • Significantly improved mobile support

Credits

Aileen Nowak, Kevin Ansfield, David Wolfe, John O'Nolan, Hannah Wolfe and Katharina Irrgang