Ghost Release: 5.96.1

TL;DR

Ghost v5.96.1 brings significant internationalization improvements with new language support for Swahili, Bengali, and Indian-Tamil, plus enhanced translations for multiple existing languages. This release fixes a critical 404 error affecting Tips & Donations on subdirectory sites and includes numerous performance optimizations that improve boot time and asset handling. The update also features UI refinements to the admin interface, including better search functionality and improved member management screens.

Highlight of the Release

• Fixed critical 404 error for Tips & Donations on subdirectory sites
• Added new language support for Swahili, Bengali, and Indian-Tamil
• Significant performance improvements through lazy-loading and optimized dependencies
• Enhanced UI elements including search functionality and member management screens
• Improved translations across multiple languages

Migration Guide

No migration steps are required for this release. The update primarily includes bug fixes, performance improvements, and language enhancements that should work seamlessly after updating.

Upgrade Recommendations

This release is recommended for all Ghost users, especially those:

1. Running Ghost on subdirectory sites who use the Tips & Donations feature
2. With international audiences who would benefit from the expanded language support
3. Looking for performance improvements in their Ghost installation

The update contains no breaking changes and should be safe to apply to all existing Ghost installations.

Bug Fixes

• Fixed 404 error for Tips & Donations on subdirectory sites (closes #21123)
• Fixed issue where useSiteUrl would return the origin of the admin URL rather than the site URL
• Removed duplicate calls to moment() to prevent unnecessary processing
• Fixed ActivityPub API URL issues
• Fixed treeshaking and require size for date-fns to improve boot time
• Fixed syntax error in Spanish translations from "Comenzar" to "Empezar"

New Features

New Language Support

• Added Swahili language translations with support for comments, ghost, portal, and signup form locales
• Added Bengali (bn) locale with signup form translations
• Added Indian-Tamil translations
• Added translation gitmoji

UI Improvements

• Added hover states for Resource boxes on Post Analytics and Dashboard
• Made newsletter preference toggles more compact on Member details screen
• Fixed alignment of icon and text in admin search
• Allowed search results to span multiple lines
• Tweaked feed item appearance in inbox view
• Added nicer "smart" apostrophes replacing "dumb" apostrophes throughout the admin interface

Security Updates

No specific security fixes were mentioned in this release.

Performance Improvements

• Improved performance of several checks in GScan with partial caching implementation
• Lazyloaded multiple dependencies (cheerio, etc.) to reduce eager loading
• Refactored assets minification to DRY up implementation
• Lazy-minified assets at first request instead of on boot
• Added flag to skip GScan checks during boot with new optimization:themes:skipBootChecks config flag
• Removed init of mobiledoc HTML renderer on boot
• Standardized mobiledocLib renderer access pattern
• Removed lodash usage from config utils and helpers
• Fixed treeshaking and require size for date-fns, improving boot time by approximately 5%
• Removed Sentry span creation from get helper
• Removed usage of fs-extra in favor of native fs lib

Impact Summary

Ghost v5.96.1 is primarily a maintenance and enhancement release that focuses on three key areas: internationalization, bug fixes, and performance optimization.

The most notable fix addresses a 404 error affecting Tips & Donations functionality on subdirectory sites, which is critical for publishers using this monetization feature on such installations.

On the internationalization front, this release significantly expands Ghost's language support with the addition of Swahili (spoken by over 200 million people), Bengali, and Indian-Tamil, while also improving existing translations for Vietnamese, Spanish, Portuguese, Ukrainian, German, Indonesian, and Croatian.

Performance improvements are substantial, with optimizations that reduce boot time through lazy-loading of dependencies, deferred asset minification, and more efficient code patterns. These changes should result in faster startup times and reduced resource usage, particularly beneficial for larger Ghost installations.

UI refinements enhance the admin experience with more compact newsletter toggles, improved search functionality, and better hover states for interactive elements. These changes, while subtle, contribute to a more polished and efficient publishing workflow.

Full Release Notes