Previously, Buttondown's changes were in the form of a changelog, hosted generously by the fine folks over at Headway.
Headway is great, but as Buttondown matures there's a lot more content and writing that needs to develop around it, stuff like:
- API documentation
- a knowledge base
- content marketing
This stuff requires a level of sophistication (or, if not sophistication, etymological complexity) that connotes my favorite three-letter word: CMS.
Choosing a CMS these days is just as fraught and hairy of a decision as choosing a tech stack (hell, it is choosing a tech stack), and I batted around a number of options:
- I love static site generators, but I wanted an easier deployment process than what they offer. Specifically, I wanted an admin interface that made drafting and publishing easy (especially when I'm away from my laptop.)
- I looked at Craft, which had a lot of praise from friends and peers, but the hosting story seemed murky and developing a theme locally seemed painful (I do not want to have to run MySQL just to write some templates!)
- Wordpress is, as always, an elephant in every room: but I didn't think I needed the complex ecosystem behind it and wasn't thrilled about the concept of writing PHP.
Meanwhile, I've had Ghost bookmarked for ages. It offers a lot of great quality-of-life stuff out of the gate:
- A beautiful admin interface (as seen above).
- Built-in support for Handlebars, a great and functional templating interface
- A reasonably priced managed hosting offering.
And so, yeah! Buttondown's blog runs on Ghost. I'm excited to explore Ghost's ecosystem more — it's been a delight to work with thus far — and as always, feel free to email me if you have any questions about the platform.