Ghost is great for lots of things. I was self-hosting it (of course) in a linux container on my Proxmox VE to record what I’d done on Proxmox, my backup procedures, etc. However I’ve recently rekindled my interest in photography and I wanted a pretty way to show my new images, and that’s where it came unstuck. If you’re a writer and the bulk of your content is the written word with the occasional illustration then yes, Ghost is the right tool for the job. Like I said though, I wanted to showcase my galleries and images in an easy, customisable and pretty fashion. There’s no way to accomplish this with Ghost, even with the bewildering and eye-wateringly expensive array of themes avaialble.
I really, really wanted to use ConcreteCMS for the project. Once set up it’s as easy as WordPress to use and build content with. But it’s unusable if you want to self-host and use a custom domain behind a reverse proxy. Honestly, I consider myself pretty savvy with these things but after four full days of trying and failing I just gave up!
Setting it up on a vanilla Debian 13 LXC alongside MariaDB was a piece of cake. Accessing it from an internal IP address on my network was smooth as silk, it couldn’t be simpler. Spurred on by this easy success I went into the SEO section in the admin panel and assigned my canonical URLs. Then it broke. Again and again and again.
Access the login page using the custom domain work fine, but then when you enter your credentials it insists on sending an HTTP (non-SSL) request which of course fails. There’s nothing useful in the documentation (which is really, really shit) or Concrete forum posts after around 2018 that mention this. When it is mentioned then the wildly-varying advice relates to massively out-of-date versions.
Four solid days! You’re clearly meant to be using a paid hosting version to get any joy with it. Fuck that.
Anyway, as you can see I revisited WordPress which has come on leaps and bounds since the last time I looked at it! I’m using the Twenty Twenty Five theme that does everything I need at this point, I think it looks good, and it’s accessible.
I’m going to use this as a fresh start and publish only new content from here, without importing my previous stuff.