The New Face of CodeAStar

You may have noticed our site has undergone a complete transformation. It's true, it's true, it's true, we have officially switched our platform from WordPress to Ghost.

Reasons to Change

Since our founding in 2017, CodeAStar has been a hub for exploring and sharing new technology. Originally, we chose WordPress because it was the leading blogging and CMS platform in the market. Fast forward to 2025 — nearly 20 years later — the top blogging platform nowadays is... still WordPress 🤣. Okay, you may ask:

What is the point of changing to another platform?

WordPress remains a solid, popular, and user-friendly choice, and we have nothing against continuing to use it. However, CodeAStar is about experimentation and embracing innovation. Since 2018, we have had a strong appreciation for Node.js. Ghost, an open-source, modern blogging platform built on Node.js, aligns perfectly with our vision (plus, to be honest, we’re not fans of PHP 😏).

As developers, it’s important to step out of our comfort zones and explore new technologies — that’s the primary reason behind our shift to Ghost.

Besides that, Ghost is widely used by a variety of respected companies across diverse industries including business, education, and technology.

Don't you wish to join the Ghost cool kids club? Just like our core idea in CodeAStar, we don't wish upon a star, we code a star, let's do it!

Steps to Change

Here’s a brief overview of how we migrated CodeAStar from WordPress to Ghost:

1. Test Ghost locally
   We started by installing and experimenting with Ghost on our local machines.
2. Import WordPress posts
   Posts and content were migrated from WordPress to Ghost.
3. Deploy Ghost to the web
   Finally, we deployed our Ghost blog online.

Like everything at CodeAStar, we love starting things for free. You can try Ghost for free by running:

npm install -g ghost-cli

(don't tell me you didn't have npm installed... if this is the case, let's go to Node.js to get started)

Then create a directory on your computer, navigate into it, and run:

ghost install local

At this moment, what we need to do is... just wait.

After the installation, you will see a similar thing like:

This indicates that Ghost has started and you can go to http://localhost:2368/ghost/ to access the Ghost admin page.

If you stop the Ghost server, you can always run the following comment to restart it:

ghost start

Now we have a local hosted Ghost platform up and running, it is time to migrate posts from WordPress to Ghost. We can follow the official migrating from WordPress to Ghost guide to do the migration job. Since we are using the local host setting and don't have internet access to our local site. We use the official Ghost plugin in WordPress instead (please note that the plugin is developed by none other than John O'Nolan, Ghost’s founder and former WordPress UI team lead). After several clicks and download and upload for export and import, we will get:

It already looks production ready, but yes, some cleanup is needed, such as replacing WordPress specific tags and adjusting code injection.

After that, choose a hosting provider to deploy your Ghost site. Options range from major providers like Amazon and Azure to independent services. Just pick whichever you are comfortable with. Then you can explore and adopt different settings and strategies, in order to transfer your website to the final form. So does CodeAStar, we are still learning and keep transforming.

Conclusion

Back to the core question, should we use WordPress or Ghost? It is all depending on who you are.

WordPress remains the best choice for general users. With thousands of themes and plugins, it’s capable of building virtually any site — blogs, company sites, e-commerce, news portals, and more. Plus, you’ll find a wealth of community support and troubleshooting resources online.

Ghost, on the other hand, is ideal for those seeking something new and willing to face fresh challenges. It may take more time to achieve what you can do quickly with WordPress, but the experience and satisfaction are, priceless.