Welcome to Ghost: Your First 10 Minutes

Why Ghost?

Ghost is the world's most popular open-source publishing platform. Used by Apple, Mozilla, DuckDuckGo, and thousands of independent creators, Ghost gives you everything you need to publish, grow an audience, and get paid — without the bloat of WordPress or the lock-in of Substack.

What makes Ghost different

Unlike WordPress, Ghost was built specifically for publishing. No plugin soup, no security patches every week, no PHP. Just a clean, fast, modern publishing platform that does three things exceptionally well:

• Publishing — A beautiful editor that gets out of your way
• Memberships — Built-in subscription and payment processing via Stripe
• Newsletters — Send emails to your subscribers directly from your posts

Your first post

The Ghost editor uses a card-based system. Each block of content — text, image, code, embed — is a card. Start typing for text, or use the + button to insert other card types.

Keyboard shortcuts

Ghost's editor supports standard Markdown shortcuts:

• ## Heading — Creates an H2 heading
• **bold** — Bold text
• - item — Bullet list
• / — Open card menu

Next steps

In the next lesson, we'll explore Ghost's content editor in depth — including images, embeds, code blocks, and the powerful toggle card for FAQ sections.