@Madchatthew my advice here would be to meet NodeBB do it all. I tried the alternative route with ghost and it became too difficult to manage from the theming perspective alone. Ghost is great if you just want a simple blog but doesn’t fare so well if you need to customise it. I managed to get everything to work the way I wanted, but it still took an extensive amount of custom JS code and CSS. Decent themes in ghost are also a little hard to come by, meaning further customisation is also required to get the exact look and feel that you want.
Finally, there’s the general lack of plugins. Ghost isn’t WordPress, so don’t expect it to be as packed with decent (and some equally awful) plugins out of the gate. Ghost excels when it comes to speed being based on NodeJS instead of PHP meaning that the code itself doesn’t need to be compiled on each page load. However, the lack of plugins and extensibility without coding knowledge can lead to an unfamiliar experience, and frustration if you’re not sure where to start.
I also found the ghost forums not exactly the greatest of experiences. I identified what I’d easily class as a bug and it was met with something of a mediocre response to say the least. Here’s the post itself
https://forum.ghost.org/t/unable-to-start-ghost/26383
Not that I want the “red carpet” treatment (I’m a little old for that 
) but simple responses like “ghost doctor” aren’t going to help anyone with not much experience. Quite off-putting in my view.
If you’re looking to expand your horizons by leveraging LinkedIn, feel free to look me up. My profile link is below
https://www.linkedin.com/in/phenomlab
More than happy to cross promote you.
