Ghost 3.0 was released recently. Let's take a look at what is new in this release.
Note
This is a historical release post from 2019. If you're looking for the latest Ghost features, start with the current Ghost changelog or check our more recent Ghost update posts.
Membership & subscriptions
The major feature in this release, basically introducing a new business model.
Even though the feature is still in the beta phase, it lets you add members and a subscription model for your blog (free and paid), letting you decide if all or certain posts should be only available to members or paying members.
With this feature, you can make sure that your blog can only be accessed by the subscribed members or choose to make it available to the public in addition to the subscription.
To implement the payment side of the subscription Ghost has integrated Stripe payment gateway with no additional fee charged by Ghost.
Ghost in the JAMstack
Another major change coming with Ghost 3.0 is that Ghost is now a headless CMS. Meaning you don't necessarily have to use Ghost themes, you can connect it to a static site generator like Gatsby.
Ghost would act as the backend in this case where you can add posts and other content (just until now), and Gatsby or another static site generator can request data through an API.
Ghost now has native support for certain static site generators via the Ghost APIs. For current documentation, see the Ghost Developer Docs.
Theme deployment
Ghost now provides a way to deploy theme changes directly from Github. Until now you had to manually make a zip, navigating to Ghost Admin, and uploading the file in the browser. (or maybe some custom process)
Now it's possible to create a new custom integration in Ghost, copy your Admin API keys into your repository's Secret tokens, then copy and paste over the template Github Actions workflow.yaml.
New WordPress plugin
A new Wordpress plugin was created, which provides a single-button-download of your full WordPress content + image archive in a format which can be dragged and dropped into Ghost's importer.
Others
Besides the mentioned changes, the editor itself was extended with new card types. Themes have to include some new css classes to handle those cards.
We updated most of our themes already to be compatible with Ghost 3.0. Have a look at our premium ghost themes.