Ghost is a truly impressive CMS

I am blown away at the outstanding quality and usability of Ghost (ghost.org). This site is running Ghost 5, on a Google Cloud VM Instance (e2-medium, though you could probably get away with a smaller E2 instance). Ghost is probably best described as an open source, headless content management system (CMS) based on Node.js, MySQL, and Nginx. If you are familiar with setting up a virtual machine on a cloud provider, I would imagine you could have your environment and a Ghost site up and running within thirty minutes.

Some of the aspects about Ghost that have stood out to me are:

1. It is really fast: Right out of the box, the site / page loading time is lightning fast, which has the obvious benefits to user experience and page rankings.
2. It is really beautiful: Again, by default, the typography, super smooth scrolling, the admin / editing UI, etc., are really quite something. Creating and consuming content on a Ghost site is pleasing. The Using the Editor page in the Help section of ghost.org gives a good overview of creating and editing content.
3. The documentation is excellent: Depending on whether you are using the paid subscription Ghost(Pro) option, or a self-hosted option on your own server (or Docker), you might start at Resources, or How to Install Ghost. All of the documentation is thorough yet concise, easy to follow, and just works.
4. It is usable immediately: After setting up your server or cluster, and installing a Ghost site, one can start making posts and creating pages right away, without additional configuration. Installing themes and integrations is a straightforward and quick process as well.
5. Ease and number of integrations: The number of available integrations and themes for a Ghost site are more than most users would ever need, and the ease of utilizing the integrations or themes is astounding. The simplicity in Ghost theme design makes it easy to customize the look and feel of a Ghost site.

A core feature of Ghost is the user subscription model for monetizing content and/or retaining readers. That may make Ghost ideal for blog or news sites, there is no reason why Ghost could not serve as the basis for a business front or e-commerce website.

Out of the box, Ghost provides a sleek, unobtrusive rich text editor for content. Highlighting a bit of content in the editor pops up a small row of buttons for bold, italics, headings 1 and 2, blockquotes, link, and to create a snippet. Keystrokes, such as Ctrl-B (bold), Ctrl-I (italics) and (Ctrl-S), work as well. The Ghost content editor is very similar to the Medium editor, but I would say even better.

Also by default, at least with Ghost 5+, it is possible to embed images and galleries, videos, audio, files, markdown, raw HTML, buttons, collapsible content, and external content, such as YouTube videos and Twitter posts. This is certainly by no means an exhaustive list, and these options are all available by default. This means that there is no downloading, installing and configuring of modules to make the embedding options possible, i.e., no impediments to starting to creating content immediately.