Finley.im and Finley Home are powered by Ghost. Finley Home launched soon after the initial beta came out and, while it has been rough at times using beta software, I have loved the platform. The features that have been added over the last year have been fantastic, but I’m still waiting on some (for me) major features to really enhance my use of the platform.
1. Post Scheduling
With Finley.im, I save links as drafts all the time. Sometimes I jot down commentary in the moment, sometimes I wait. Once the post is ready to publish, I hold for specific times. I have nearly a dozen in the queue right now. Through analytics, I’m working to determine the high traffic times and work around them. Scheduling posts is a no brainer and really sets Ghost behind most platforms because of the lacking of this feature.
2. Access to Posts
Currently the posts array is only available in the home.hbs, index.hbs, and custom tag pages. This is paginated by the platform and the number per page are determined by a dropdown in the admin panel. Last week I tried to create a custom Featured page for featured posts and found that the posts array is not available to make it happen.
The Ghost team is working towards a query helper that will allow the theme to query posts, pages, and tags with filters. This would allow for many things, including a list of frequent tags, of featured posts, and even creating a custom archive page that lists all posts for easy access.
3. Real Custom Homepages
Ghost currently has the ability to create a custom home.hbs, but the page is treated like the first page of the blog. I’m doing this on Finley Home. It cannot be a standalone separate from the blog. So if you have 10 posts per page, the first 10 would be available on the home page and then page two would be starting with 11. Ghost defends this choice by saying that Ghost is purely a blogging platform, but that isn’t wholely true since they support custom pages.
My want would be to use the upcoming query helper (see #2) to display the first three posts on the homepage and then a link to view the blog in the navigation, which would start on page one.
4. More RSS Control
For Finley.im, I’d love to have a Featured feed and a Links feed. I could see a simple interface for creating new feeds with custom filters or automatically creating tag-based feeds.
5. API
Both an OAuth API for full CRUD functions and a non-OAuth API for easy access to authors, posts, and tags would be wonderful. I would love to build a Ghost iOS app. Easily save a link to a new post with an iOS 8 share sheet, save as draft, publish, or schedule (see #1). This would be awesome for my flow.
These are my top 5, I want to hear yours. Share in the comments below!