Great piece, Sarah!

I've been following Ghost for quite awhile. It was very interesting to see our friends over at WooThemes jump on board. And there's no question that it looks gorgeous.

I've long thought that WordPress needed something to motivate it to make an elegant and inviting experience to the pure and fresh blogger. When I see projects like Medium, PostHaven, SVBTLE, it becomes more and more clear that WordPress is missing out on a gigantic opportunity. Most people coming to the Web just want a simple, no-frills platform to write and share a few images or videos.

So when this serious, open-source contender like Ghost comes along, I feel it will be a very good thing for WordPress. The development community will react to what Ghost has done, and I believe WordPress will snag a few pages from Ghost's approach to result in a significantly simplified experience that meets the needs for people who are new to content publishing, while also maintaining the power and control that us power users desire.

WordPress can be that platform that not only enables the most incredible amount of control, customization, and community from a CMS, but I feel that one day WordPress can be the entry point for future and aspiring content creators. But it's not completely there yet.

I've already seen time and time again when friends of mine who get started on a WordPress blog (and, in many of those cases, I'm the one setting them up), they post for a few times for maybe a month or two, and then they ask me for something simpler. They don't want to deal with plugins or customizing themes. They don't like seeing endless text fields with settings galore. They just want it to work.

Interestingly, over at ManageWP, we're at the complete opposite end of the spectrum. We're helping people who have complex businesses with dozens to thousands of websites to easily manage their sites. Even for the hardest of hardcore content publishers and hackers, they still desire a platform to make it very easy for them to get to business.

There's still a lot of improvements that need to be made to WordPress. However, tackling the problem of complexity, so that people who are just wanting to get started blogging can go easily pick WordPress, seems to be the way to go. I look forward to seeing what Matt and the WordPress community is going to come up with next.

In the end, I hope that this will result in everyone in the WordPress ecosystem benefiting greatly in the future.