How to Try Alpha Features in Ghost

If you use Ghost, you may have already noticed that there is a "Labs" section available in the administration. This section contains some features that are still being finished by the Ghost team.

But did you know that there is a hidden section on this same page that shows other features being built right now? 👻

Differences between beta and alpha features

Beta features are ready for use by testers. Eventually, probably in the next major version, these features will become more stable and documented. They will be ready for use by the general public.

On the other hand, alpha features can be really unstable or just proof of concepts. Their audience is mostly compromised by internal Ghost teams and some crazy developers like me who like to try new features before anyone else. 🤣

As you might have already guessed, the alpha phase is followed by the beta phase. 😬

How to activate alpha features

Even looking at the official documentation, you shouldn't be able to find how. Or at least, I haven't found it yet. 🙄

But I found a mysterious switch, named enableDeveloperExperiments, by looking at TryGhost/Admin repository, which is the admin client that comes with Ghost. 🔎

This boolean switch can be enabled with an environment variable or directly in the settings.json file.

version: "3.8"

services:
  ghost:
    environment:
      enableDeveloperExperiments: 'true'
    image: ghost:4.41.3-alpine

{
  "enableDeveloperExperiments": true
}

If you restart your Ghost instance, you should now be able to access the hidden section. 😉

Now let's take a look at some features that may land in some future Ghost releases. 🤗

Next features

Multiple newsletters

If you write on a variety of topics, you may have dismissed the idea of using the native newsletter functionality in Ghost, as all posts will be sent to the same audience. Personally, as I write in French and in English, my potential members could receive articles in a language they wouldn't understand... 🤨

With this new feature, a creator could have two newsletter lists, one for each language. Or, someone might want to have one newsletter for a collection of tags, and another for a specific tag.

Unfortunately, since this is just a mockup, I couldn't try this new feature, but it's something I'm really interested in!

Cardmageddon - Before/After

I recently came across a case on my post on SVGOMG (in French!) that I wish I could allow the user to compare before/after images.

No more trying to cross your eyes trying the notice the differences between two images, you can just drag a vertical divider over the images to help! 🙂

Conclusion

Are you looking forward to these new features? 🤩

If you enable alpha features, remember that they might not be implemented any time soon, so don't base your blog on them! 😉

Have fun! 🥳