Ghost v4 launched and besides the new look and design improvements there are a lot of useful features that were added as well. Let's have a look at the most important ones:
The new ghost dashboard
The new dashboard in the Admin area can help you get detailed insights into how content and members are performing so you can have an overview of what's working and plan ahead based on that.
Newsletter and Memberships
Newsletters and membership are now a native part of Ghost and no longer in beta. With native email newsletters you have an easy way of developing a relationship with your audience. Additionally using the native engagement analytics you can understand what content is getting the most attention.
Ghost makes it easy to manage a membership based business with native signup forms that work on any site. A new memberships and subscriptions UI (Portal) was added, which works with every Ghost theme.
You can also impersonate members, making user support much easier, as well as generating single-use authentication links, and collect cancellation feedback.
New $9 starter plan
A new $9 starter plan was added, making Ghost(Pro) more accessible. This plan includes:
- 25k views/month
- 1000 members
- custom domain
- managed ghost instance
- automatic updates
- maintenance & backups
- CDN & SSL certificate
- and more..
Unfortunately you can't use custom themes with this plan at the moment.
New post preview
A new post-preview UI was added, with the ability to check you what your post will look like on web, mobile, email, social and search.
With this feature you can have a better overview over your content and how it will look like.
Content snippets & public preview
A couple of new additions to the editor as well.
You can now create re-usable snippets of content that can be quickly accessed and inserted into any new post. New snippets can be created from any piece of content in the editor, by highlighting content and using the new snippet button. When you're ready to use the snippet again, snippets can be recalled in any other post from the card menu.
The public preview is another useful feature to define a certain portion of your post as public while the rest might be for free or paid members. It's a good way of driving signups.
Automatic responsive images and lazy-loading
Ghost now outputs automatic responsive, lazy-loading images, this was missing in the post content (image cards and gallery cards). This change will improve front-end performance by a significant amount.
While Ghost was fast before this is a really important step, especially for image heavy posts.
While these were the main features added, there is much more to know. For this check out the full changelog.
All our premium themes have been updated and fully support Ghost 4.0. Check out all our Premium Ghost themes for Ghost 4.0.