Goodbye Ghost...

It wasn’t long ago that I decided to leave Ghost CMS, after receiving a polite email asking me not to use the Ghost name or anything derived from it. It all stemmed from a GitHub page where, throughout 2024 and 2025, I’d collected various resources for Ghost.

It was a nice little project. It kept itself updated, hunting things down, testing code, and so on. All automated. But the fun came to an end, and the whole thing stayed on my mind.

In July, I decided to leave Ghost. I knew what I was getting into: there were dozens of automations and webhooks I’d have to move over.

After a lot of research, though not nearly as careful as it should have been, I chose Statamic. I was fairly happy with it until I realized it had paid plans. That was the detail I’d missed, and you can imagine how disappointed I was.

Between Ghost and Statamic, I’d still choose Ghost if I were starting over. Both are excellent and offer plenty of useful tools. In terms of usability, I prefer Ghost. For customization, Statamic wins.

But I still wasn’t satisfied. I wanted complete freedom.

That’s when I read that Olly, the creator of Pagecord, was going to make Pagecord’s code available on GitHub. I went to have a look and spent the afternoon going through it. I realized I could use its backend while keeping full freedom to customize the frontend. I also really liked the text editor and the possible integrations.

Olly did a great job with this project. It’s remarkably complete, and I really like it.

So I adapted Pagecord to work as a one-person blog. I disabled a lot of features and added two or three of my own, ending up with a tangle of things that happened to be useful to me.

In short, I split Pagecord into a backend and a frontend so I could work on each separately.

And by far, it’s been the best choice yet!

This site is running on that setup right now. I’ll make the code available soon. I just need to remove a few secrets first. I’m going to do what Olly did!

That's it! cya