All new Ghost Docs & Integrations

Our entire Ghost docs library has had a complete makeover as well as some brand new additions including tutorials and integrations!

The goal of the new docs is to help more people install and manage their publications effectively, as well as to make the most of Ghost's flexibility as an open source publishing platform. The design and structure has been revised and we've improved guides for getting started with Ghost and understanding the core concepts of how it works, as well as adding in some new content: tutorials and integrations.

Additionally, something that we're really excited about is that the site has been built as an example of the future of Ghost - as a Headless CMS!

Improved design & structure

One of our goals was to make the new docs site easier to navigate and discover the right information when you need it the most. Our previous documentation was disjointed and cumbersome, to put it lightly.

To solve this, we've put all of our docs under one roof at ghost.org/docs. The site has been carefully designed and structured to help new and existing Ghost users find the right information. When you can't find what you are looking for, you can use the new site-search to find it quickly.

Tutorials

Ghost is a flexible publishing platform that can be configured in a multitude of ways, so we've launched a new tutorials section to provide helpful guides on how to customise and configure a Ghost site for a variety of common use cases. This is a resource we are going to expand continuously and includes tutorials about site configuration, theme development, front-ends and more.

The extensibility of the open source software is available whether you are publishing on a fully managed Ghost(Pro) site, or self-hosting your Ghost install – so these tutorials are a useful hub for anyone who wants to customise their site!

Integrations

For a long time we've talked about building apps into Ghost and allowing people to integrate with other services. The hold-up has always been: Most things simply don't need an app! Looking at the plugin directories of other platforms reveals that the majority of apps and extensions are junky packages which add a button to inject a script or similarly trivial functions. They make things seem easy, but they're actually not very good!

The truth is that for the majority of integrations you simply don't need a complex plugin or extension or third party application. You just need a little know-how.

So, our new integrations directory is a little different to most! Rather than additional software packages to install, it's more a collection of integration guides. Tutorials and helpful documentation explaining how to take your site's functionality beyond the confines of Ghost and work seamlessly with other platforms. Most of the time, without installing anything!

There are lots of different ways to integrate with all manner of tools, from analytics and email marketing, to utility and custom storage adapters. We're continually adding new integration guides, and expect this library to grow over time.

Built with Gatsby, deployed with Netlify

One interesting note about the new docs is that it's a static site is built with Gatsby, and deployed with Netlify - but almost all of the content is delivered by the Ghost API, effectively using Ghost as a fully headless CMS, bypassing the theme layer completely 😵 – more on this soon.

What's next?

This is not the end of the road for Ghost Docs. We still have work to do including expanding the content with further tutorials, integrations and API documentation.

We're applying the same standards to our docs as we do to our code to ensure that it evolves alongside Ghost. We hope that it provides an improved experience for developers building modern publishing websites ✨

If you have suggestions for tutorials or guides that you'd like to see, we'd love to hear from you. Send us a tweet, or stop by at the forum.