Polls are here: the first of the Ghost®-first plugins

Polls, the first of the Ghost-first plugins

Ask your readers that in the post itself, and watch the answers land. That's Polls, and it's the first plugin in a line PixelGlass is building specifically for Ghost.

Until this week PixelGlass built themes and published them, and that was the whole product. A poll isn't a theme decision, though. It's a feature, and features belong to the site rather than the theme. So there's a plugin layer now, Polls is the first thing built through it, and more will follow the same way: made for Ghost rather than adapted from a generic embed.

Getting one into a post. Copy the snippet, paste it in, publish. The poll renders inside the post wearing your theme: your accent colour, your real typeface (loaded properly, not just named by string), and light or dark to match the post it sits in. It loads lazily, so it costs your readers nothing until they scroll down to it.

What Polls does:

• Polls and quizzes. Early bird or night owl has no right answer, and the poll never pretends it does. A quiz does have one, and reveals it once a reader commits.
• Members-only polls. Anyone can read the question; the vote and the results are reserved for members. Sign-in and sign-up are separate buttons, because most people meeting a members-only poll don't have an account yet.
• Results you control. Show tallies after voting, after close, or never.
• A returning member sees the vote they already cast. Reload the post and your selection is still on screen.

Everything is scoped to your site now

The app is now scoped to a site rather than to a single theme, behind a navigation rail with a site switcher that shows each connection's health.

Overview is one screen for what's live on the site: which theme, when it shipped, and how many times you've published, with the full publish log behind it. PixelGlass records every publish now, so "what's live here, and when did it ship?" has an answer.

Site insights reports three groups of numbers Ghost's own dashboard doesn't:

• Publishing rhythm. Median cadence, current weekly streak, longest silence, and draft debt with the age of the oldest draft.
• Audience health. Member mix, 30-day joins against the previous 30, members quiet for 90 days, never-seen signups, average open rate, and median free-to-paid time.
• Content structure. Untagged posts, orphan tags, top-tag concentration, author split, and how much sits behind the paywall.

The agent got better at reference sites

• It reads a site like a browser. Point it at a reference site and it pulls the real copy instead of a soup of navigation and footer text. Sites that used to reject the fetch outright now let it through.
• It can clone a site's brand assets. Ask it to take a logo or brand image from a reference site and it downloads it straight into your theme. Text content stays off-limits, and rights to any asset are yours.
• It hands settings back to you instead of guessing. When a request touches something you own, like accent, fonts, logo, routes, or preview content, the agent opens the right panel rather than baking a value into the theme. That handoff is free; you're not charged for a turn that only opened a panel.
• Click an element and the agent knows what it looks like. The selection chip carries the element's live rendered styles: font, size, weight, colour, background, radius, padding. So "what is it currently?" gets answered from what's on screen.

A fresh coat

The app now looks like pixelglass.co: the same navy ink, blue-to-violet accent, and Space Grotesk and Instrument Sans type.

Fixed

• Login failing outright for a small set of accounts whose verification timestamp was written in the wrong format. Every request touching those rows errored, including the login lookup. Repaired.
• Ghost(Pro) sites on a custom domain. Your admin address and the address your readers are on are two different origins, and we treated them as one. Left alone it would have blocked reader-facing features on the most common paid Ghost setup, and rejected genuine signed-in members as signed out.