Hey! Welcome to Ghost, it's great to have you :) We know that first impressions are important, so we've populated your new site with some initial Getting Started posts that will help you get familiar with everything in no time. This is the first one!

Ghost uses a language called Markdown to format text. When you go to edit a post and see special characters and colours intertwined between the words, those are Markdown shortcuts which tell Ghost what to do with the words in your document. The biggest benefit of Markdown is that you can quickly apply formatting as you type, without needing to pause.

Ghost has a single, powerful organisational taxonomy, called tags. It doesn't matter whether you want to call them categories, tags, boxes, or anything else. You can think of Ghost tags a lot like Gmail labels. By tagging posts with one or more keyword, you can organise articles into buckets of related content.

Ghost has a number of different user roles for your team Authors The base user level in Ghost is an author. Authors can write posts, edit their own posts, and publish their own posts. Authors are trusted users. If you don't trust users to be allowed to publish their own posts, you shouldn't invite them to Ghost admin.

Sometimes you might want to put your site behind closed doors If you've got a publication that you don't want the world to see yet because it's not ready to launch, you can hide your Ghost site behind a simple shared pass-phrase.

There are lots of powerful things you can do with the Ghost editor If you've gotten pretty comfortable with all the basics of writing in Ghost, then you may enjoy some more advanced tips about the types of things you can do with Markdown!

Creating a totally custom design for your publication Ghost comes with a beautiful default theme called Casper, which is designed to be a clean, readable publication layout and can be easily adapted for most purposes. However, Ghost can also be completely themed to suit your needs. Rather than just giving you a few basic settings which act as a poor proxy for code, we just let you write code.