The blog is an important part of any enterprise, it is the main way of communication between customers and your company. To create a full-fledged blog, you need a content management system. It is quite easy to use and efficient, it adapts and develops according to your requirements. In this article, we will look at how to create your blog with Ghost Hosting. This hosting is quite popular because it does a good job of providing companies of all sizes with a quality platform to interact with customers.
Installation
Ghost hosting offers several versions of hosting. If you want to work on the installation yourself, Ghost provides you with the Ubuntu 20.04 LTS version as a base on your computer.
The installation process itself is well documented, with the download and installation of the supported versions of the MySQL database server, the Nginx web server, and the Node.js. 14. x-series release. But if you want to simplify this process you can use a ready-made Ghost image which will be deployed much easier.
But the easiest way to prepare the base is to use the Ghost (Pro) service, which makes the whole platform manageable. The server offers reliable security and usability features such as backups, automatic server updates, and SSL certificates.
When you purchase Ghost (Pro), you have a choice of several plans and two weeks of free usage.
Initial configuration
If you do decide to set up your blog manually, you’ll have to spend some time getting your site to look the way you envision it.
When you have finished the installation process you will have a custom configuration file set by default, and inside it is the configuration settings that you need to set up.
Some of them are mandatory, such as the public URL of your blog and the type of database used, and optionally, such as storage adaptation, which you can configure later.
Ghost-CLI is something you should understand. This feature will help with updates and during maintenance. So using certain keys from the hosting you will be able to update or return a previous version of the site, as well as add values to your configuration file.
Set up your blog
Now you can move on to setting up the appearance of your blog. Keep in mind that the user you add is a full user of the site without any restrictions. With this function, you can share admin duties with your co-owner (maybe even more than one).
Your blog has these roles:
- Owner – the default user, that is, the one who created the site
- Administrators – with little or no different authority than the owner
- Editors – manage and edit content
- Participants – users who can write posts, but are not allowed to publish them
To add someone from the users, you need to go to the control panel and click on the “staff” tab. There you will see a list of already existing employees, and the “invite people” button, click on it and enter this user’s email address, then select his role and send an invitation to the mail.
Another interesting function is “members”, which is needed to monetize content through paid subscriptions. It works like this: contributors sign up with their email and subscribe to your blog. After that, they will be able to access only the content that corresponds to their access level.
When you have all these parameters figured out, you can start publishing content.