Hey! Welcome to Ghost, it's great to have you :) We know that first impressions are important, so we've populated your new site with some initial Getting Started posts that will help you get familiar with everything in no time. This is the first one! There are a few things that you should know up-front: Ghost is designed for ambitious, professional publishers who want to actively build a business around their content. That's who it works best for. If you're using Ghost for some other purpose, that's fine too - but it might not be the best choice for you. The

Ghost uses a language called Markdown to format text. When you go to edit a post and see special characters and colours intertwined between the words, those are Markdown shortcuts which tell Ghost what to do with the words in your document. The biggest benefit of Markdown is that you can quickly apply formatting as you type, without needing to pause. At the bottom of the editor, you'll find a toolbar with basic formatting options to help you get started as easily as possible. You'll also notice that there's a ? icon, which contains more advanced shortcuts. For now, though, let's

Ghost has a single, powerful organisational taxonomy, called tags. It doesn't matter whether you want to call them categories, tags, boxes, or anything else. You can think of Ghost tags a lot like Gmail labels. By tagging posts with one or more keyword, you can organise articles into buckets of related content. Basic tagging When you write a post, you can assign tags to help differentiate between categories of content. For example, you might tag some posts with News and other posts with Cycling, which would create two distinct categories of content listed on /tag/news/ and /tag/cycling/, respectively.

Ghost has a number of different user roles for your team Authors The base user level in Ghost is an author. Authors can write posts, edit their own posts, and publish their own posts. Authors are trusted users. If you don't trust users to be allowed to publish their own posts, you shouldn't invite them to Ghost admin. Editors Editors are the 2nd user level in Ghost. Editors can do everything that an Author can do, but they can also edit and publish the posts of others - as well as their own. Editors can also invite new authors to

Sometimes you might want to put your site behind closed doors If you've got a publication that you don't want the world to see yet because it's not ready to launch, you can hide your Ghost site behind a simple shared pass-phrase. You can toggle this preference on at the bottom of Ghost's General Settings Ghost will give you a short, randomly generated pass-phrase which you can share with anyone who needs access to the site while you're working on it. While this setting is enabled, all search engine optimisation features will be switched off to help keep the site

There are lots of powerful things you can do with the Ghost editor If you've gotten pretty comfortable with all the basics of writing in Ghost, then you may enjoy some more advanced tips about the types of things you can do with Markdown! As with the last post about the editor, you'll want to be actually editing this post as you read it so that you can see all the Markdown code we're using. Special formatting As well as bold and italics, you can also use some other special formatting in Markdown when the need arises, for example: strike

Creating a totally custom design for your publication Ghost comes with a beautiful default theme called Casper, which is designed to be a clean, readable publication layout and can be easily adapted for most purposes. However, Ghost can also be completely themed to suit your needs. Rather than just giving you a few basic settings which act as a poor proxy for code, we just let you write code. There are a huge range of both free and premium pre-built themes which you can get from the Ghost Theme Marketplace, or you can simply create your own from scratch. Anyone