Suppose you are leveraging the Ghost platform’s powers to run your business or blogging websites and are wondering what factors you need to consider before you deploy and publish it. In that case, this guide should prove helpful, and by the end, you should have a better understanding of testing a website built with Ghost.

Table Of Contents

What is Ghost?

Ghost is an open-source blogging platform built to simplify the process of online publishing for individual bloggers and online publications. One can use its tools to create blogging websites, publish content and even send newsletters to their paid audience.

It launched in 2013, with the project founder having worked in WordPress – a Content Management Site (CMS) also used for making websites and blogs. Today, Ghost is a popular choice amongst individuals and organizations for publishing blogs and content. Some notable users of the platform are IBM, Tinder, Sky News, VEVO, and Zappos.

Also, It is the #1 CMS on GitHub, having 42k stars (by the time of writing this blog) and being used by millions of people.

It offers an on-prem solution and also a managed service – Ghost (Pro) that requires minimal to no maintenance and handling of servers. If you are a person who wants flexibility, is tech savvy, or has a tech team to manage and monitor the servers, the on-prem solution might be the one for you, whereas if you don’t want all that hassle and just want to focus on the content, Ghost (Pro) would be a good choice.

On top of this, it offers multiple third-party integrations like Stripe, Google Analytics, Twitter, YouTube, and many more that can enhance your website.

There are, of course, other CMS alternatives available to start your blogging site or other websites, like Substack, WordPress, Medium, Patreon, etc.

The moving parts

So, you must be wondering that since everything is being handled by the Ghost blogging platform itself and that there is a lot of abstraction from the internal workings, what is there left to be tested by you? Let’s see.

Ghost is built on NodeJS, and uses technologies like ExpressJS, MySQL & SQLite databases, and Markdown, Ember, Handlebars for templating and user interface. Most of these things are used internally and abstracted from you as a user.

However, what we can control is the Handlebars part of it, which is used for creating the user interface (HTML) of your website. Ghost provides various themes out of the box, and one can also create a theme and upload it. So, we can use Handlebars, which is a templating language, to create custom themes to be used by the platform.

Another variable is the version of the platform you’re using. Even though the Ghost.org team thoroughly tests and then releases a version, upgrading to the newer versions could cause regression. So, one should have test cases in place to prevent this from happening.

So, as we can see, the moving parts over which we have control are quite small. Hence the scope of testing is also minimal. The relevant aspects to be tested could be as follows:

GScan Testing (Ghost Theme Scanner)
Unit Testing
Browser Testing and Cross-Device Testing
Mobile-friendly Testing
Performance Testing

GScan Testing

GScan is the authorized tool for scanning Ghost themes. It checks for errors and feature support.

GScan works on a set of rules. Each rule has a way of checking whether it has failed or passed and also gives a descriptive solution on how to resolve that. There are three error levels associated with each rule, which are as follows:

recommendation: these are things the dev might want to know about

warning: usually used for deprecations, things that will be errors in the next version

error: anything that makes the theme invalid or incompatible with the current version of Ghost

In addition, an error can be marked as fatal. It means that if it is left unchecked, a Ghost publication would throw 500 errors on certain pages because of the detected out-of-date or erroneous code.

Unit Testing

Unit Test is performed to test the different “units” in a source code, to ensure that every single unit is functioning properly.

There are several JavaScript Testing frameworks to choose from, such as Jest, Mocha, and Jasmine. Any one of these can be used to define the test cases, which can then be run on your custom Ghost Themes.

One way to test and streamline your unit tests is to use a testing tool like Testsigma. The tool helps in the easy creation, execution, and management of your test cases, saving effort and time while improving your code’s quality.

One can write test cases in simple English language, which means that anyone can contribute to testing. Besides, the platform reduces or even eliminates the complex setup processes, and the learning curve to use the tool is also not steep.

Browser Testing

Browser Testing is done to check whether the published website is rendering according to the expectations or not in a Web Browser. All the different aspects of the website’s UI (User Interface) can be tested through this test. Also, the test is not just limited to one Web Browser. Users all around the world use different browsers to access content on the internet. Some of the popular web browsers are Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

Conducting Cross-Browser Testing will ensure that every user consuming the content will have the same experience, without any surprises.

Also, one can test how a website would look and function on different devices like Desktops, Tablets, Mobiles, TVs, etc, to ensure multiple device support.

It is very important to know your user base and the kind of devices you want your website to function properly on.

While conducting Browser Testing, one has to make a list of devices and browsers they want to target for running their website seamlessly. This can be a time taking, manual and tedious task to complete.

But by using a tool like Testsigma, we can run all the tests parallelly and complete all the tests in a short period.

Mobile-Friendly Testing

As mobile phones and tablets have become more powerful and prominent in today’s world, in most cases the traffic generated on websites is from these devices.

So, it is wise to test if your websites are mobile responsive, and whether all the features and functionalities are accessible from these devices, and offer the same experience as on other devices.

Testsigma can be used here as well. As it helps you in delivering an amazing mobile experience to your clients and users of the website. Since it is a no-code tool, anyone without any kind of coding expertise can run the tests.

Visual UI Testing

Your Website’s UI must look according to the expected requirements. Hence, all the visually identifiable aspects should be checked for and asserted properly. For instance:

Text Alignment with Images

UX distortion on the device’s resolution change

All interactive elements are accessible and not hidden because of any kind of overlapping.

No UI distortion on zooming in and out.

Use Testsigma to run visual UI tests as well. It takes snapshots of the UI, which you can use to compare before and after scenarios and catch visual bugs.

Conclusion

Millions of websites are published using the Ghost platform, as it is user-friendly and quick to publish. If your website is one of those millions, I hope you have a better understanding of what to test and how to test when building a Ghost website.

We saw what Ghost is and what services they provide. Following that, we dived into the internals and the moving parts of a Ghost website, which are the factors we have control over. Then we learned about all the aspects of software testing, and what all tests are required to ensure the proper functioning of the website or application.

As it is evident, Testsigma allows us to test all these aspects and provides us with all the features required for testing a Ghost Website.

I hope I left you with something new to learn!

ghost inspector alternatives

https://testsigma.com/blog/ghost-inspector-alternatives/

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