Ghost Release: 2.23.4

TL;DR

Ghost 2.23.4 is a maintenance release that significantly improves AMP page generation performance and fixes a critical redirect issue. This update focuses on performance optimizations, bug fixes, and architectural improvements that enhance the platform's reliability and speed, particularly for sites with image-heavy content.

Highlight of the Release

• Significant performance improvement for AMP content generation with many images
• Fixed redirect handling for absolute URLs
• Added performance monitoring for {{#get}} helper operations
• Improved code architecture by moving components to Ghost SDK

Migration Guide

No migration steps are required for this update. This is a drop-in replacement that can be installed using your normal update process.

Upgrade Recommendations

This update is recommended for all Ghost users, especially those with:

• Sites using AMP with image-heavy content
• Sites using redirects to external/absolute URLs
• Developers working with themes that use the {{#get}} helper extensively

The performance improvements and bug fixes provide meaningful benefits with no breaking changes, making this a safe and valuable upgrade.

Bug Fixes

Fixed Redirects to Absolute URLs

This release fixes an issue where redirects to absolute URLs (those including a host/domain) were incorrectly modified with the site's subdirectory path. Now, when a redirect's "to" property includes a host, Ghost will:

• Skip replacing any paths
• Redirect directly to the specified absolute URL
• Properly handle external redirects

This resolves issues where external redirects would fail or redirect to incorrect URLs.

New Features

Performance Monitoring for Theme Helpers

Ghost now includes a new performance monitoring feature for the {{#get}} helper, which can identify slow operations that might impact site performance:

• Automatically logs warnings when {{#get}} operations exceed a configurable time threshold (default: 200ms)
• Provides detailed information about the slow operation including API call details and number of returned rows
• Configurable via new settings in your Ghost config:

  {
      "logging": {
          "slowHelper": {
              "level": "warn",
              "threshold": 200
          }
      }
  }
  

This feature helps theme developers and site administrators identify and fix performance bottlenecks in themes, particularly those using limit="all" or other operations that might fetch large amounts of data.

Security Updates

No security fixes were included in this release.

Performance Improvements

Faster AMP Content Generation

Ghost 2.23.4 significantly improves the performance of AMP page generation, especially for content with many images:

• Updated to Amperize v0.5.2 which includes:
  • Partial image loading for faster processing
  • Parallel network requests for fetching image dimensions
  • Improved fallback mechanism from probe-image-size to image-size
  • Fixed HTTP to HTTPS conversion issues

These improvements reduce the time required to generate AMP pages, particularly for image-heavy content, resulting in faster page loads and better user experience.

Impact Summary

Ghost 2.23.4 delivers important performance optimizations and architectural improvements that enhance the platform's reliability and speed. The AMP content generation improvements will be particularly noticeable for sites with image-heavy content, potentially reducing page generation times significantly.

The addition of performance monitoring for the {{#get}} helper provides developers with valuable insights to optimize theme performance, which can lead to better overall site speed. This is especially important for sites with large amounts of content where inefficient theme code can cause performance bottlenecks.

The architectural improvements, including moving components to the Ghost SDK, continue Ghost's journey toward a more modular codebase with clearer separation of concerns. This benefits the long-term maintainability of both Ghost core and custom themes.

Overall, this release represents a solid maintenance update that improves performance and reliability without introducing breaking changes.

Full Release Notes