Ghost 4 has been released roughly a month ago with exciting new features and fresh new looks for content creators like me!

What's new?

The Ghost changelogs page shows all the new features Ghost 4 offers but here the ones I take interest to:

Improved Memberships and Subscriptions

Memberships is now out of beta! I love how they made the Sign Up UI for Ghost. Signing up for a Ghost blog can be paid or free.

Right now, I don't know yet if I will implement this for Kana PH. I want the content to remain free but I want to enable donations to the site. This will help its maintenance. Good thing the Ghost platform uses Stripe to enable payments; since it supports over 100 currencies with support for Google Pay and Apple Pay.

Email Newsletters

Now email newsletter is built natively to Ghost! Before I was trying to implement this back when Kana PH is using Ghost 3.x, but I stopped when I realized that it is too much work. Now, I can go back to implementing an email newsletter for the site for better reach! Hope you don't mind, I promise it won't be spamming your inboxes!

Updated Admin Panel

I love how they organized the menu this time! It doesn't look cramped in the side bar, like before. Since the layout is new, I'm a little confused on what goes where. But I don't think that would be a problem for long.

New Preview UI

I think, this is my most favorite feature so far! Now, I don't need tinker with my browser to see how the article would look like in web and mobile views. Along with the social media preview, they added email newsletters preview, too!

Upgrading is easier this time

Upgrading from Ghost v3.7.x to v4 wasn't that hard compare to what I did before. As usual, I followed the guide and the upgrade went smoothly.

First thing I did is I upgraded the ghost-cli to its latest version:

npm install -g ghost-cli@latest

Then logged in as the ghost-mgr user, and went to the Ghost installation directory.

sudo -i -u ghost-mgr
cd /var/www/ghost

From there, I upgraded to the latest minor version of Ghost 3. This step is needed to be able to upgrade to Ghost 4.

ghost upgrade v3

It seems upgrading from Ghost 2 to 4 is also possible as long as you are using the latest minor version of that major version, according to their docs.

After installing the latest minor version, I can now just upgrade to the latest version; which is 4.2.2 as of this writing.

ghost upgrade

After that I just opened https://kana.ph and confirmed that it is indeed running on Ghost 4.

To ensure stability, I also upgraded the theme and tweaked it again to fit my dark themed website. Upgrading the theme for Ghost 4 don't have that much effect, but I don't like seeing deprecation warnings.

What's next?

What I am thinking currently is implementing an email newsletter for Kana PH. But I don't want it to be wordy just like the main article is. There has to be a way to send email that looks different from the main article.

Next would be the payment system. I'm thinking to monetize this site on the side, but I don't want to paywall my content. All of the content here should be 100% free! Maybe a donate button is a small step with that?

For now, I will continue writing articles as usual. This site has been very useful for me as a notebook for my new discoveries, and telling stories on some of my interests. Hope you continue to stay tuned!