Ghost

Ghost provides a first-class REST API called the Admin API for programmatic content management. IndexPine uses this API to create posts with full HTML content, featured images, tags, and publication status — everything Ghost supports natively.

Supported Ghost versions

IndexPine supports Ghost 3.x and later. Ghost Cloud (ghost.io) and self-hosted Ghost installations are both supported. The connection method is identical for both.

Step 1 — Create a custom integration

1. Log in to your Ghost admin dashboard (typically at https://yourdomain.com/ghost).
2. Click the gear icon (⚙) in the bottom-left to open Settings.
3. Click "Integrations" in the left sidebar.
4. Scroll down and click "Add custom integration".
5. Name it "IndexPine" and click "Create".
6. Ghost generates an Admin API Key and Content API Key. Copy the Admin API Key — it looks like a long hex string in the format id:secret.
7. Note the API URL shown on the same page, e.g. https://yourdomain.com.

Step 2 — Connect in IndexPine

1. In your IndexPine dashboard, go to Settings > CMS Connection.
2. Select "Ghost" as the CMS type.
3. In the "Site URL" field, enter your Ghost site URL, e.g. https://myblog.com.
4. In the "Admin API Key" field, paste the full Admin API Key including the colon.
5. Click "Test connection".

How publishing works

IndexPine uses the Ghost Admin API v3 (or v4 on newer Ghost versions) to create posts. The payload includes:

• title — the article's headline.
• html — the full article body as HTML.
• feature_image — the URL of the AI-generated featured image (hosted on IndexPine's CDN).
• excerpt — a one-paragraph teaser for social sharing.
• tags — optional tags you configure in IndexPine settings.
• status — either "published" or "draft" depending on your autopilot approval setting.

Tags

To automatically tag posts, add a comma-separated list of tag names in Settings > CMS Connection > Default Tags. If a tag does not already exist in Ghost, the Admin API creates it automatically.

SEO & structured data

Ghost gets the richest SEO payload of any integration because its Admin API exposes dedicated fields for all of it, rather than IndexPine having to improvise:

• A schema.org Article JSON-LD block is written to codeinjection_head — Ghost's real per-post head-injection field — instead of being crammed into the post body.
• meta_title and meta_description are set for search engines, plus og_title/og_description and twitter_title/twitter_description for link previews on social platforms.
• The featured image gets real alt text (feature_image_alt) from the article title.

Troubleshooting

• 403 Forbidden — the API key is incorrect. Regenerate it from Ghost Settings > Integrations > IndexPine.
• Posts appear but have no featured image — Ghost requires the feature_image to be a public URL. IndexPine uses its own CDN for images, so this should work by default. Check that your Ghost installation has no Content Security Policy blocking external images.
• Publishing to Ghost Cloud fails — ensure your Ghost plan supports the Admin API. The Starter plan does support it.