We just wrapped up our first Magic Pages Open House: a video call where we sat down with a bunch of you to show what we've been building, what's coming next, and to answer your questions.
Thank you to everyone who joined. It meant a lot to see so many of you take time out of your day for this.
First, an apology
It was our first time hosting something like this, and it showed in one place in particular: after letting everyone in at the start, we completely forgot to keep checking the Zoom waiting room. If you joined a few minutes late, you were most likely stuck there, looking at a waiting screen while we happily carried on inside. I am really sorry about that. That's a crappy way to be treated when you've made time for us and it's entirely on me.
We initially planned to use a different tool for the call, but the recordings turned out to be unusable, so we jumped on Zoom last minute – and as you can see in the recording, I have no idea how that tool works.
Next time, someone from our team will be dedicated to managing the waiting room and the Q&A, so nobody gets locked out and your questions get picked up properly while the rest of us talk. Lesson learned.
The recording
The full recording is on YouTube, with chapters so you can jump straight to the parts you care about:
What we covered
Private RSS feeds for your members (beta). Ghost's built-in RSS feed only includes public posts. Our new feature gives every one of your members a personal feed URL that includes the members-only content they have access to and stops working the moment they're no longer a member. Nine publishers and almost 600 of their members are already using it. We're rolling it out to everyone in the next week or two. If you'd like early access, just send us a message.
Off-site backups. We already back up every site daily to a separate server. On top of that, you'll soon be able to receive a daily copy of your site in a place you control: an S3-compatible storage, an SFTP server, or – if you just want one-click peace of mind – Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. It's in testing now and rolling out in the coming weeks.
AI controls, live for everyone today. In your customer portal you can now block all AI crawlers from your site with a single switch, or go the other way and enable Ghost's experimental llms.txt feature if you want AI tools to find your content. We don't think it's our place to make that choice for you – so now it's yours.
And a follow-up we promised during the Q&A: Roy asked whether you can let AI crawlers in while explicitly requiring them to honor your site’s license – embedding accountability instead of just blocking. It turns out standards for exactly that are emerging. The W3C’s TDM Reservation Protocol (TDMRep) lets your site declare, in machine-readable form, that text and data mining – including AI training – is reserved, and point to your license. In the EU, this has real teeth: under the AI Act, AI model providers are legally required to find and honor these reservations. A crawler that ignores them can no longer claim it didn’t know. Alongside that, the IETF’s AI Preferences working group is finalizing a vocabulary for robots.txt and HTTP headers that distinguishes between purposes, so you could allow search indexing but forbid training, for example.
If you want to declare your terms today, you can add the TDMRep signal to your site right now via Ghost Admin → Settings → Code Injection → Site Header:
<meta name="tdm-reservation" content="1">
<meta name="tdm-policy" content="https://your-site.com/your-license-page/">The second line is optional and points to a page describing your licensing terms. Honest caveat: outside the EU, adherence is still mostly voluntary. We’re looking into surfacing this in the customer portal as a proper middle ground between “block everything” and “allow everything” – if that’s something you’d use, tell us.
Advanced search, version 2. Our search add-on got its first big overhaul: semantic search that understands what people mean (search "tomatoes", find the vegetable gardening guide), author search, members-only content in results without leaking the content itself, privacy-aware search analytics, and three new layouts. It's open source for the whole Ghost community and will come to Magic Pages in the next week:
magicpages
What's coming
The big one for the rest of 2026 is the external customer portal: all your Magic Pages sites in one dashboard, with 10% off every additional site, consolidated billing (one invoice instead of ten), email credits shared across your sites, digitally signed data processing agreements, and server-side analytics Ghost itself can't show you – like how many AI crawlers hit your site and what your cache hit ratio looks like.
And one more thing: we started a podcast 🎙️
The Magic Pages Podcast is live: biweekly conversations with the people building, hosting, and publishing with Ghost. The first episode is the three of us figuring out what Magic Pages actually is, and episode two features our very first customer, Christine.
Jannis Fedoruk-Betschki
The podcast theme we built for it will be released as a free, open-source Ghost theme in the next couple of weeks and we're planning to open-source all our existing themes along with it.
See you in September
Before the next Open House, you can find us at Indiecon, the independent publishing festival in Hamburg in early September. We're sponsoring, exhibiting, and hosting a workshop. The Q3 Open House follows later that month, hopefully with a smoothly managed waiting room this time.
Questions about anything we covered? Send us a message at help@magicpages.co!
