Platforms
Specter is a content sync engine, not a CMS. It connects to the platforms you already publish on and keeps a local folder of markdown perfectly in step with the live site. Today that means three platforms: Shopify, WordPress, and Ghost. Same workflow, same syntax, same sync model.
This page is the marketing-level overview. For the precise matrix of what each connector can pull and push — including the rough edges — see the Capabilities matrix.
Why three CMSes, one tool
The traditional answer is that you pick a CMS and stick with it. Every CMS has its own admin panel, its own AI plugin marketplace, its own ecosystem of “10x your content” tools. None of them talk to each other, and none of them give you the same workflow if you happen to publish on more than one platform.
That answer breaks the moment you have:
- A Shopify storefront blog and a WordPress flagship site for the same brand.
- A Ghost newsletter that syndicates posts from your main blog.
- A client portfolio with three Shopify stores, four WordPress sites, and a Ghost-based community blog.
- Plans to migrate from one platform to another and zero appetite for re-platforming hell.
Specter’s pitch is simple: stop treating the CMS as the source of truth. The folder of markdown on your disk is the source of truth. The CMSes are render targets. You write — or AI rewrites — in the folder; Specter keeps every render target in sync.
That’s how you can run the same brand on three platforms without three separate workflows. It’s how you can A/B test a piece of content on WordPress before promoting it to a Shopify storefront. It’s how migration goes from “six-month project” to “change the destination and click Sync.”
Shopify
Shopify ships with a blog system that almost no one talks about and almost no one uses well. The article editor is a hidden corner of the admin, the SEO surface is shallow, and the AI integrations available in the Shopify app marketplace are mostly closed-loop add-ons that charge per article generated.
Specter takes a different angle. Your Shopify articles are pulled into the local folder as standard markdown. You edit them with whatever tool you want — including the AI subscription you already pay for — and Specter pushes them back through the Shopify Admin API.
What round-trips today: article body (markdown ↔ Shopify rich text), title, handle, blog assignment, author, publish status, scheduled date, tags, summary, SEO title, SEO description, and the published-at timestamp. Connections are scoped to articles and blogs only — Specter never sees your orders, customers, products, inventory, themes, or payouts. The OAuth token lives in the macOS Keychain on your Mac.
Who it’s for: Shopify store owners who run a content marketing motion alongside the store. SEO operators who need to ship dozens of category-page articles a week without grinding through the admin. Agencies managing multiple stores who want one folder per client instead of one browser tab per store.
WordPress
WordPress is the workhorse of the open web — and the most painful platform on this list to run modern content operations on. The Block Editor is good for handcrafted pages and terrible for bulk work. The REST API is comprehensive but unforgiving on long runs. The plugin ecosystem for “AI writing” is full of tools that paste GPT output directly into the editor with no quality control.
Specter connects through the WordPress REST API using Application Passwords. That works on self-hosted WordPress, WordPress.com Business and above, and any managed WordPress host that exposes the standard REST endpoints (WP Engine, Kinsta, Pressable, Pantheon, and so on).
What round-trips today: post body (markdown ↔ HTML, with reasonable fidelity for headings, lists, links, images, code blocks, and standard block-editor blocks), title, slug, status (draft, pending, publish, scheduled, private), publish date, excerpt, featured image URL, tags, and categories. Custom post types, ACF fields, and Gutenberg blocks that don’t have a clean markdown equivalent are preserved as raw HTML in the body — round-tripped, not lost, even when Specter can’t pretty-print them.
Who it’s for: Editorial teams running large WordPress publications who want a real bulk-edit workflow. Site owners migrating from page builders (Elementor, Divi) to a cleaner content model. SEO operators running programmatic SEO on a WordPress base. Anyone whose AI workflow currently involves “paste into the editor and pray.”
Ghost
Ghost is where Specter started, and the support is deepest here. Ghost’s API surface is clean, its content model maps cleanly to markdown, and the typical Ghost user is exactly the kind of person who already lives in a text editor.
Connection is through the Ghost Admin API key — paste it into Specter once and the connection persists in the Keychain. Works on Ghost(Pro), self-hosted Ghost, and any reverse-proxied Ghost setup that exposes the admin endpoint.
What round-trips today: posts (drafts, published, scheduled), pages, tags (including internal tags and tag metadata), authors, slugs, excerpts, custom excerpts, feature image URL, published timestamps, meta titles, meta descriptions, OG fields, Twitter fields, and Ghost’s featured flag. Mobiledoc and Lexical card edge cases — complex embeds, HTML cards, gallery cards — are handled with markdown-friendly representations where possible and round-tripped verbatim where not.
Who it’s for: Writers, newsletter operators, and content businesses already on Ghost who want any modern AI tool to edit their archive. Multi-site Ghost operators with the same content syndicated across several Ghost instances. The early Obsidian-Ghost-plugin community looking for a more stable upgrade path.
Cross-platform: migration, multi-site, syndication
Because all three connectors read and write the same markdown folder, three workflows that used to be hard become easy.
Migration. Pull your old site into the folder, repoint Specter at the new platform, push. The body and the frontmatter that translates cleanly will move; the platform-exclusive surface gets flagged in the Capabilities matrix so you know what needs hand-attention before launch.
Multi-site. Run a single content team writing into one folder, with Specter syncing to multiple destinations: a Shopify storefront, a marketing-focused WordPress site, and a Ghost-based newsletter. Each CMS sees the same canonical version of every post. You stop maintaining three editorial workflows for the same brand.
Syndication. Publish primary on one platform, republish on another with a canonical link. Specter handles the duplication and the canonical metadata so the syndicated copy doesn’t compete with the original in search.
What’s not here yet
Specter is a focused tool, not a kitchen sink. A few things we’re deliberately not chasing:
- Webflow, Framer, Squarespace — closed platforms with no real public content API. We’ve evaluated them and the round-trip fidelity isn’t there.
- Headless CMS connectors (Sanity, Contentful, Strapi). Those tools are already designed for code-first workflows; Specter’s value is much lower there.
- Drupal, Joomla, Craft. Possible eventually, not on the near-term roadmap.
If you publish primarily to a platform not on this page, tell me what you’d use Specter for — the list of platforms we support is shaped by what real customers ask for.
For the precise pull/push surface per platform, see the Capabilities matrix. To start with the official app, buy Specter Pro. For the free forever route, use the open-source project on GitHub.