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Tomek Poniatowicz for GraphQL Editor

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New Ghost 3.0 and how to use it with GraphQL (Gatsby)

Ghost is a very popular open-source publishing platform, described by many as a modern alternative to WordPress. Their premise is making publishing as easy as possible and they do deliver!

Ghost has proven its usability by gaining the trust of such tech giants like Mozilla, OpenAI, Apple, Tinder, DuckDuckGo and thousands of small & medium companies.

A week ago big news hit the Internet that the new version of Ghost is available and I think that the release timing wasn't a coincidence ... Happy Halloween ;)
Happy Halloween

As mentioned by its developers, Ghost 3.0 is all about enabling new business models for publishers.

Ghost 3.0 features:

  • Native support for memberships - allowing you to easily turn your anonymous page viewers into registered users,
  • Stripe integration - to enable subscription business model for all publishers (Ghost takes 0% transaction fees!)
  • JAMstack native architecture - documented integrations with Gatsby, Next, VuePress, and more.
  • many new integrations - you can use your favorite services with Ghost, the full list is available here
  • and of course, it remains an open-source platform!

If that's not enough and you are still hesitating if you should give Ghost a try it is also worth mentioning that:

  • has blazing-fast & modern codebase,
  • fully open-source permissive MIT license,
  • much cheaper than WordPress (see below) Ghost vs WordPress
Source: ghost.org

Ghost + Gatsby (GraphQL)

One of my favorite things about Ghost is that it works great with Gatsby & Gatsby equals GraphQL. GraphQL is a query language for APIs where when you ask for data you get exactly what you need - nothing more, nothing less. This how it looks compared to REST.

GraphQL vs REST

Source: blog.apollographql.com

Fetching data from the Ghost API for a Gatsby site is very simple, especially when using GraphQL. Let's take a look at some basic operations that can be done to retrieve data from the Ghost API with GraphQL.
Take a look at these common examples of operation you probably need to perform when using GraphQL to query the Ghost API for your company page, news site or blog. All examples come from Ghost docs.

Fetching posts

In this example, we take a limited amount of posts per page & use ‘skip’ to paginate through pages containing those posts:

Alt Text

Source: ghost.org

Filtering Posts

Filtering posts by tag is a widely used case:

Alt Text

Source: ghost.org

Retrieving settings

The Ghost settings node differs from other nodes (it’s a single object). To query it you need to:

Alt Text

Source: ghost.org

Retrieving the list of all tags

Getting all tags from a Ghost site is simple. You could them to form a tag cloud or a keywords list:

Alt Text

Source: ghost.org

Speed up your GraphQL API development

GraphQL Editor is a supportive tool for both advanced GraphQL users as well as those taking their first steps with GraphQL APIs. Our all-in-one development environment for GraphQL will help you build, manage & deploy your GraphQL API much faster thanks to dozens of built-in micro features. Its graphical interface will also fix communication within your product team. Visualization is the key!

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