Everything You Need to Know About Ghost 0.5
After months of work and much anticipation, Ghost 0.5 is finally here. This version is as exciting as the first version, if not more.
Although a major chunk of the work in this release has been on the admin area, Ghost 0.5 still packs in a re-designed default theme and new functions for theme developers.
Multi-user support
The highlight of Ghost 0.5 is multi-user support. Now it’s possible to create different type of users with restricted access. Inviting new users and assigning them roles is simple. The different user roles that can now be created in Ghost are:
- Owner: This role is given by default to the first user created after installing your Ghost blog. A user with the “Owner” role has complete access to the blog’s settings, posts and other users. Only 1 user with the role of “Owner” can exist at a time and this user cannot be deleted, however the “Owner” role can be assigned to any other user with “Administrator” role.
- Administrator: A user with the role of an “Administrator” can perform all actions similar to the role of “Owner” with the only exception being that this user can be deleted or their role can be changed by another user with the role of “Administrator” or “Owner”.
- Editor: A user with role of “Editor” has access to all the content (Posts and Pages) and can also invite new users. They cannot delete any existing users and can also not change any blog settings.
- Author: A user with the role of “Author” currently has the least privileges. They can create new content (Posts and Pages) and edit any content authored by this user.
The privileges increase based on role with “Author” having the least privileges and “Owner” having all of them. The steps involved in inviting new users, changing their roles or revoking their access is pretty straight forward.
Admin rewrite with Ember.js
The Ghost admin now uses Ember.js, making Ghost a full featured client side JavaScript application. Anything you do in the admin area is updated real-time. This will be useful for general users and will also ensure fewer bottlenecks as the development of Ghost speeds up.
Public JSON API
Ghost 0.5 now comes with a full-fledged public JSON API where every single feature is available for 3rd party developers. We recently talked about WordPress adding an API for some major features. Well, the Ghost API exposes absolutely everything in the Ghost platform. Now 3rd party developers can build their applications on top of Ghost similar to Twitter and other social platforms.
New theme features
In verion 0.4, the Ghost team introduced “tag.hbs”, a custom template to display tag archives.
Version 0.5 introduces two more templates, “home.hbs” and “author.hbs”, along with new helper functions.
- Author Template: Since Ghost now supports multiple users, theme developers can now create a custom template to display posts from a single author. This template should be named “author.hbs”. In absence of this template, the “index.hbs” is used to render the content.
- Home Template: Theme developers can also create a new template “home.hbs” to customize the home page of a Ghost blog. This template is only used for the home page and is optional. When the contents are paginated, “index.hbs” is used to display the subsequent paginated contents.
- New {{plural}} helper: With this new helper, you could format the display of number of posts. For e.g. {{plural pagination.total empty=’No posts’ singular=’% post’ plural=’% posts’}} will display “No Posts”, “1 post” or “x posts” based on the number of posts. The updated default theme “Casper” uses this to display the number of posts on Tag and Author archives.
- Updates to {{#has}} helper: The {{#has}} helper introduced in Ghost 0.4 now supports the author attribute. With this you can check if a post is authored by a particular author.
Re-designed default theme: Casper
The default theme “Casper” has received a major overhaul. In line with new design trends, if a blog cover is set, you would see a full screen cover image when visiting the home page. Some of the other noteworthy changes to Casper are:
- An author archive displaying author information and a number of posts.
- Easily accessible RSS subscribe buttons for the complete site feed as well as the author feed.
- Typography changes and fine tuning.
More details on this release can be found on the official Ghost blogs at Ghost 0.5 – MSR1 and Make Your Theme Multi-User Ready.
What’s next?
Starting from now, we can expect to get new version of Ghost much faster thanks to a new release cycle. Some of the important features we can expect within next few months are:
- Sitemaps
- Post Images
- Post Scheduling
- And the much awaited Apps (plugins for Ghost)