I am definitely amongst the growing group of developers that are fascinated and thrilled by node.js, its thriving community, its being simple yet powerful, super-fast and scalable.
Although my main language remains PHP (mostly because my employer wants me to work with it, but also because of its enormous libraries collection and its maturity as a language for the web), I can undoubtedly see a future with most of the cool apps out there being developed with node.js. I am convinced that, should I start a new project of my own today, a project that I believed would conquer the market, I would totally go for a lightweight HTML5 + CSS3 + JS (with the help of Angular.js) interface backed by a powerful node.js (with express.js)-based API.
So when I came to know about this new, elegant and lightweight blogging platform named Ghost and based on node.js I was more than happy and I thought it was just what we needed to be finally set free from WordPress! But I then worked out that I was almost surely wrong.
WordPress is a CMS, not a blogging platform
While it still remains the best blogging platform out there, as of today WordPress is a fully fledged CMS and, in my opinion, it’s the best CMS you might desire. It’s simple enough to use and it’s got so many plugins and extensions that to call it an ecosystem wouldn’t mean overrating it. And, to be fair, the fact that it’s based on PHP means that it can run virtually everywhere with the minimum effort required.
Ghost is what it claims to be: just a blogging platform
Ghost is beautiful, easy to use and it’s got everything in the right place. The dashboard is right the one that you would love to have in your WordPress blog. And it’s seriously fast, and you would expect that since it’s built on node.js. But it’s limited to blogging and they (the developers) want it to be so. That’s great indeed, but it means that you have to be sure that your blog will always be just a blog, nothing more. And you’ve got to know that, apart from the pleasure of a great platform for writing, you’re not going to have a lot more in terms of functionalities and extensions. Of course they’ll come in the future, but we can easily say that in the foreseeable future they won’t be as many as WordPress.
Conclusion/Verdict
They’re both great platforms, WordPress being a lot more mature, Ghost being still in its infancy. Just don’t think of them as one replacing the other. They do different things, and they both work. Decide what your website is gonna be about and then pick the right platform for you!
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