If you've only ever written in WordPress, your first few minutes in Ghost's editor feel almost suspiciously simple. There's no sidebar stuffed with widgets, no fifteen-tab settings panel staring at you while you try to write a sentence. Just a blank page and a cursor.
But "simple" doesn't mean "limited." Ghost's editor is built around a system called cards, and once you understand how they work, you realize the editor can do a lot more than it looks like at first glance. Here's the full picture.
What Makes Ghost's Editor Different
Most blogging platforms give you one of two experiences: a giant toolbar with buttons for everything, or a plain text box where formatting means typing asterisks and hoping for the best.
Ghost takes a third approach. The base writing experience is clean and distraction-free, similar to typing in Notion or Bear. You write in plain text, and a small contextual toolbar pops up when you select text, letting you bold, italicize, add links, or turn a line into a heading or quote. Markdown shortcuts work too, so if you already think in Markdown, typing ## followed by a space instantly creates a heading without ever touching your mouse.
The real power shows up when you need something more than plain text. That's where cards come in.
What Exactly Is a Card?
A card is a self-contained content block you can drop into a post anywhere you want. Think of your post as a stack of building blocks: some blocks are just paragraphs of text, but others are entire functional units, like an image gallery, an embedded tweet, a styled call-to-action button, or a collapsible FAQ section.
To add one, you click the + button that appears on a new line, or just type / and start typing the name of what you want. A small searchable menu pops up, you pick your card, and it drops into place. Once inserted, you can drag and drop cards to reorder them, which makes restructuring a post far less painful than cutting and pasting paragraphs around.
The Full Lineup of Cards
Here's what's actually available in the editor today, grouped by what they're for.
Media cards
- Image: drop in a photo, add a caption and alt text, and choose how wide it displays. Images are automatically compressed and made responsive, so you don't need to manually resize anything before uploading.
- Gallery: group multiple images into a clean grid layout.
- Video: upload video directly or embed from elsewhere.
- Audio: perfect for podcast episodes or music files you want playable right inside the post.
- File: attach a downloadable file, like a PDF or worksheet, with a clean download button.
Layout and structure cards
- Header: large, styled section headers, useful for breaking up long posts visually.
- Callout: a highlighted box (often with an emoji) for tips, warnings, or anything you want to visually set apart from the rest of the text.
- Toggle: a collapsible section, ideal for FAQs or anything you want hidden until a reader clicks to expand it.
- Blockquote: styled quotes that look noticeably better than just italicized text.
- Button: a standalone call-to-action button you can link anywhere.
- Divider: a simple visual break between sections.
Embeds and external content
- Bookmark: paste any URL and Ghost generates a clean preview card with the page's title, description, and image, the same kind of card you see when sharing links on social media.
- Embed: drop in links from supported platforms (YouTube, Twitter/X, Spotify, and others) and they render as live, interactive embeds rather than plain links.
- Product: showcase a product, recipe, or place with a structured, embeddable card.
Code and custom content
- Markdown: for anyone who wants to write a section, or an entire post, in raw Markdown rather than the visual editor.
- HTML: paste in your own HTML for anything the built-in cards don't cover. This is how a lot of publishers build custom landing pages or pricing tables directly inside Ghost without touching their theme files.
Membership and monetization cards
- Signup: an embedded signup form you can place mid-post to convert readers into subscribers right where they're already engaged.
- Call to action: a flexible card for promoting something specific, whether that's a paid tier upgrade, a sponsor message, or an announcement. You can target it to show only to public visitors, free members, or paid members, and choose whether it appears on the website, in the email newsletter, or both.
Membership-gating tools (not technically cards, but related)
- Public preview / member-only divider: lets you write a post that's partly public and partly gated. Everything above the divider is visible to everyone; everything below is reserved for members or paid subscribers. This is the mechanism behind most Ghost paywalls, and it works without needing a separate "preview" and "full" version of the post.
Editing Images Without Leaving the Editor
One detail that surprises people coming from other platforms: Ghost has a built-in image editor, powered by a tool called Pintura, baked directly into the writing experience. You can crop, rotate, adjust, or make basic edits to an image you've already uploaded into a post, without exporting it to Photoshop or Canva and re-uploading. It's not a full design suite, but for quick crops and adjustments, it removes an entire round trip out of your workflow.
Post History: Your Built-In Undo Button (the Big Kind)
Every post you write in Ghost keeps a version history. If you're collaborating with an editor or co-writer, this means you can actually see who changed what and when, and roll back to an earlier version if something gets mangled or you simply preferred how a paragraph read three edits ago. For solo writers it's still useful as a safety net: nobody's first draft is sacred, and being able to rewind without manually undoing twenty changes is a small but real relief.
Building Entire Landing Pages With Cards Alone
Here's something a lot of new Ghost users don't realize until later: you don't always need to touch your theme's code to build a custom-looking page. Stack enough cards together, headers, callouts, images, buttons, an HTML card or two for anything custom, and you can put together a fully designed landing page using nothing but the editor itself. People have built entire pricing pages, FAQ pages, and "join our membership" pages this way, with zero theme development involved.
This matters more than it sounds like. It means the line between "writing a post" and "designing a page" in Ghost is much blurrier than in most CMS platforms, where you'd typically need a separate page builder plugin or developer help to do the same thing.
A Quick Mental Model for Using Cards Well
A few practical habits that make the card system work better for you:
- Don't over-stack cards just because you can. A post with twelve different card types feels chaotic to read. Most great posts use two or three card types beyond plain paragraphs.
- Use callouts sparingly, and they'll hit harder. A callout box loses its visual punch if every other paragraph is wrapped in one.
- Save the signup and call-to-action cards for natural pauses. Dropping a "subscribe now" card mid-sentence breaks flow. Place them after you've made a point worth following up on.
- Preview before publishing. Cards can render slightly differently depending on your theme's styling, so it's worth checking how a post actually looks before it goes out, especially if you've used an HTML card.
Why This Setup Works So Well for Publishers
The card system is really Ghost's answer to a problem most blogging platforms solve badly: how do you give writers powerful formatting tools without turning every post into a fight against a clunky page builder? By keeping the base writing experience plain and fast, and only bringing in complexity through cards you deliberately choose to add, Ghost manages to feel both lightweight for quick posts and capable enough for genuinely complex layouts when you need them.
Once you've used it for a few posts, going back to a traditional block editor with endless settings panels starts to feel like overkill for most of what blogging actually requires: writing well, formatting clearly, and occasionally needing something a bit fancier than a paragraph of text.
