Transition to Ghost(Pro) from self-hosted Ghost

[fharper]

As discussed in #58

[fharper]

After discussion with @tpayet & @qdequele, they don't want us to move to the right tool for our blog right now. It's still something I want us to do as it will help us do our work more efficiently as soon as we hire a new Technical Writer. For now, we'll manage a publishing calendar with either a Google Calendar or a Google Sheet document. We will need to optimize images by end also. We still need to find a way to have MeiliSearch on our blog as it doesn't make sense our blog does not have a search option (I may be wrong!). I doubt it's less work than moving to Wordpress, but maybe Ghost is still popular enough that the integration team can create an integration, what do you think @curquiza ?

[curquiza]

We did not have any users who asked for a Ghost integration at the moment, so not sure this is worth prioritizing. But tell me if it's necessary from your POV.

[fharper]

I'll let the bosses jump in, specially since the blog never had any search option, but from my POV, it looks bad that we offer a search solution and don't have any on our blog... I still think it will be faster to move from Ghost to Wordpress instead of creating an integration: I can do it in one hour, two if everything goes wrong.

[CaroFG]

Is this still P2?

[ferdi05]

@CaroFG I'd like to investigate the idea of hosting all blog content on GitHub. We're going to move most of the process steps to GitHub, so I guess that it will be easier to have everything here. There are a few other reasons: editing would be easier, this would encourage external contributions, it will be easier to cross-publish our content... The first thing to do I guess is figure out if this is easily supported by Ghost. Also this is the right opportunity to update to its latest version.

[ferdi05]

We're one major version away from the latest Ghost version: current version 3.5.2, latest released version 4.45

It's time for us to transition to their Cloud version, we don't want to (not) maintain and manage a self-hosted anymore. Our current version is stuck in some old k8s in DO, I don't even know if we can upgrade it.

Before doing anything to prod, I'd like us to test how things would look like in the latest version of Ghost. We can test on a local machine. Ghost provides a migration guide.

@CaroFG could you please try this out? Start by exporting all data, don't do anything to prod (not even minor version upgrade).

We should export:

• text content
• images/video content
• members list
• staff list
• theme
• injected code
• navigation
• know what integration are activited, and save their settings if feasible

[ferdi05]

Actually it was fairly easy to try it on a local Ghost installation. I'll now create a Cloud account!

Export status:

• text content: yes
• images/video content: yes
• members list: yes
• staff list: no, but it's fine as we need to be careful with the pricing
• theme: yes, but we should update it!
• injected code: saved in one of those exports
• navigation: saved in one of those exports
• know what integration are activited, and save their settings if feasible: saved in one of those exports
• routes: yes

[ferdi05]

I'm deciding which plan to go for. I'm happy with the Creator one. The only two issues would be:

1. for our largest files: We have a couple of heavy gifs and images that could be improved..
2. we only have 2 accesses. So it would be an admin access and a member access

[ferdi05]

I did that again with a Cloud version of Ghost: Ghost(Pro)

[ferdi05]

Our Ghost(Pro) trial period will end tomorrow, so I need to act fast on this. I'm giving everyone the Contributor role as it won't count towards your plan limits.

A staff member with the Contributor role can create and edit their own posts, but cannot publish. An Editor needs to approve and publish for them.

So compared to before, we'll have only one Editor role that will be responsible for publishing. Credentials will be shared within the DevRel team. I will have the Admin role.

[ferdi05]

This seems to work fine, and we even managed to transition to Ghost 5.0. Closing this now

[feynon]

Ghost has a built-in search functionality now with the July update. I would love to have search functionality on the blog. Maybe it's time to update the ghost installation, won't take more than a couple of minutes I suppose. Cheers!

After discussion with @tpayet & @qdequele, they don't want us to move to the right tool for our blog right now. It's still something I want us to do as it will help us do our work more efficiently as soon as we hire a new Technical Writer. For now, we'll manage a publishing calendar with either a Google Calendar or a Google Sheet document. We will need to optimize images by end also. We still need to find a way to have MeiliSearch on our blog as it doesn't make sense our blog does not have a search option (I may be wrong!). I doubt it's less work than moving to Wordpress, but maybe Ghost is still popular enough that the integration team can create an integration, what do you think @curquiza ?

[ferdi05]

Actually @shermix we need to update our blog template, see #426 as we're now on Ghost(Pro)