Here is a Little Sneak Peek at The New Ghost 4.0

Almost exactly 8 years ago, the first prototype of Ghost was announced. Today, over 20,000 commits later the new Ghost 4.0 – the latest major version of the product is released. If you’re short on time, here are the highlights of what’s new:

There is a dashboard! Get detailed insights into how content and members are performing.
Memberships and subscriptions are now natively part of the core platform – no longer in beta.
Email newsletters are now natively built into Ghost.
Premium subscriptions with Stripe now work in 135 currencies, with support for Apple Pay, Google Pay, and 0% fees.
There are new embedded memberships and subscriptions UI, called Portal. Past, present and future.
Member management now includes the ability to impersonate users for support, generate single-use authentication links, and collect cancellation feedback.

Photo Credits: Ghost.org

The new members can migrate data from all other email and member platforms, including payments.
Speaking of switching to Ghost, there is now a new concierge team in charge of helping people migrate from other platforms.
There is a new quick-start setup flow for new Ghost users, with a streamlined way to enter all the most common settings needed to launch a new site.
The most popular theme company for Ghost, IVEEL, released all their premium themes as official, free and open source.
The Ghost Theme directory has been rebuilt, including live previews and automatic installs.
There is a new Experts directory, for people who are looking to hire developers to help build them custom Ghost sites.
A new improved Zapier app with members features, a new global Marketplace.
There is a new built native integration with FirstPromoter into Ghost core. Enter your API key to enable the integration, and all the tracking is handled for you automatically.
Added content snippets – now you can turn any piece of content in Ghost into a re-usable snippet to power your publishing workflows.
Ghost now outputs automatic responsive, lazy-loading images. Ghost was already extraordinarily fast, but now it’s pretty trivial to hit 99-100 speed scores on LightHouse.
Major refactors of Ghost’s codebase have also improved overall performance in terms of requests.

Photo Credits: Ghost.org

There is now a new Starter plan on Ghost, to make it easier and better value to get started with Ghost than ever before.
We also rebuilt all our Ghost.org systems for signup, sign-in, billing, account management, documentation, help centre and refreshed our blog. All of those have significantly improved.
Ghost is now a team of 21 people with $3.3M annual revenue, and over $7M lifetime revenue.
In the last 12 months, our growth rate has increased by 200%, and we now serve a billion requests each month.

But…. How can we get Ghost 4.0?

All new sites on Ghost(Pro) are running Ghost 4.0. Everyone can spin up a new site in a few clicks with an unrestricted 14-day free trial. If you already have a site on Ghost(Pro) log into Ghost.org and click the “Update to 4.0” link in your admin panel.

Self-hosting Ghost? Updating to 4.0 is very straightforward with Ghost-CLI and should take about 15 mins.

And the next steps are…

Well, right now Ghost has monthly, yearly and complimentary plans built-in by default, but soon you will be able to define any plan you like with custom properties.