A Sexier Mephisto

Mephisto is a fantastic CMS. I have really enjoyed using it, and love the way it is set up and organized.

However, I’ve always thought that it was missing a couple of key features.

First, there is no form of pagination for lists of articles, including the front page. Once you’re done with the front page, you must use the archives.

Second, it doesn’t provide a full listing of archives. Archives are only listed by month. There is no way to grab all of your posts, only a limited number of posts.

However, now there are two great plugins to add in these features.

First, Sven Fuchs has written a Paged Article Lists to give lists of posts (such as your front page) pagination links. You can see this in action at the bottom of my index page. I helped (read: was really irritating) in bugfixing it so it should work smoothly.

Next, there is now a great Full Archives plugin (also by Sven Fuchs) to allow your main archives page show a full listing of all of your posts. You can see this in action on my past page. It is called the tricky edition which is actually named after me because of all my suggestions and bugfixing (read: was really really irritating).

Baiscally a great way to manage content on the internet just got way better. Yay for Mephisto! Yay for plugins!

Running Mephisto on Leopard

This is just a quick note incase anyone else has trouble installing the Mephisto svn locally on a clean copy of Leopard.

(This assumes you’re running Leopard and have a working install of MySQL. For that please see this wonderful guide. It also assumes you’ve set up Mephisto before.)

• The current Mephisto svn revision, 3037 works on Rails 2.0 PR. So to do this, you’d check out the svn of Mephisto:

  svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk your_directory

• Next you’d freeze Rails 2.0 PR, in terminal, cd to your local Mephisto directory, and run:

  rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-0_RC1

• Next you need to install the tzinfo gem and Action Web Service, with two terminal commands (while cd’d in your local Mephisto directory), running each separately:

  gem install tzinfo --remote

  And

  svn export http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk/actionwebservice/ vendor/rails/actionwebservice

• Ok! Next up you must create a Mephisto database with MySQL and properly configure your database settings in config/database.yml. Then you should be able to successfully run in terminal (in your Mephisto directory):

  rake db:bootstrap

  Or

  rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production

Start your favorite script/server for a lovely working copy of edge Mephisto on Leopard!

Many thanks to svenfuchs_ in #mephisto for the advice on a working Rails version!

*Mephisto-Fu — Nice Tags

I’m silly. I like my tags to read:

tag-one, tag-two and tag-three

Instead of:

tag-one, tag-two, tag-three

When I used WordPress, I used a plugin called Nice Categories to have an ‘and’ added and comma removed before the last tag. Thanks to Liquid, I can do the same without a plugin. In your default article template, it would be:

{% for tag in article.tags %}
{% if forloop.length == 1 %}
{{ tag | link_to_tag }}
{% elsif forloop.length == 2 %}
{% if forloop.last  %}
 and {{ tag | link_to_tag }}
{% else %}
{{ tag | link_to_tag }}
{% endif %}
{% elsif forloop.length > 2 %}
{% if forloop.last  %}
 and {{ tag | link_to_tag }}
{% elsif forloop.rindex == 2 %}
{{ tag | link_to_tag }}
{% else %}
{{ tag | link_to_tag }},
{% endif %}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}

Yay! If you have any questions, feel free to ask. :)

*Mephisto-Fu — Pretty Admin

Mephisto pretty much has the best designed CMS admin I’ve ever seen, but when I first saw SimpleLog‘s new color scheme I fell in love, and had to give Mephisto’s admin a (tiny) makeover.

In other news…

• Apple is going to fix my Macbook Pro for free! Yay! They’re also going to do it in-store, so it should only take a couple of days. They seem to think it is the case instead of the button in the front, but my guess is once they open the case they can fix the button anyway. They are going to call me to bring it in when they receive the parts. Once again I am super impressed with the Walt Whitman Apple Store.

• I haven’t watched the whole thing yet, (I have it Tivo’d, though), it seems from these clips that Rainn Wilson did a fabulous job last night. I’m quite impressed.

• I haven’t listened to We Are Scientists in months, and forgot how friggin good they are. Seriously.

Almost Oscar time. I have a bunch of reading to do, but it is supposed to snow, so I’m hoping I will have extra time to read tomorrow.

Progress

So I have officially moved to Mephisto! I have pretty much fallen in love with it as CMS. Here are a few reasons why…

• As I previously mentioned, Mephisto has sections. In my head, I kind of consider Mephisto a rails-based better TextPattern. Mephisto’s sections are like super-customizable categories, but better.

• Liquid Templates are actually extremely flexible. Compared to a traditional CMS template system (Wordpress, Movable Type…), it is infinitely more flexible. It can take some thought though if you’re not (slightly) used to object-oriented programming. I think that because Mephisto is so young, some template tags missing. You can get around this by adding your own tags/filters/macros/drops to liquid. This, of course, takes a little ruby knowledge. I have very limited ruby knowledge (though I’m getting better as I go along), and have been able to get around whatever limitations I have come across so far.

  Of course compared to Typo or SimpleLog, liquid is limiting. If you’re used to just using rail’s views, Liquid can seem very annoying. I think that people are working on giving users the choice of either rail’s views or Liquid Templates.

• Mephisto is simple. In fact I think the only complicated thing about Mephisto is Liquid. It is not bulky or bloated. It is simple and flexible.

Basically it fulfills all of my wishes for a CMS, and is malleable enough to do anything else I can think of. Yay!

Mephisto — First Impressions

So I have been spending a little time playing with Mephisto, a very promising rails CMS. Here are some initial observations…

• It has sections, just like TextPattern. However, Mephisto itself seems to be a bit confused about what a section actually is. Is a section a category? Is a section a separate website section? The beautiful part is that Mephisto is flexible enough so that you can use sections for whatever you would like. It can be category, or it can be a site section. It can use blog posts, or page posts. It can pretty much do whatever you want, without getting too confusing.**

• Mephisto uses Liquid Templates. Liquid was created by the same guy who made Typo. One thing about Typo I loved was its template system. I don’t remember what it was like exactly, but I never had any trouble with it. Liquid isn’t exactly the same. Liquid doesn’t have much documentation, and some aspects are rather confusing. I love how flexible it is, and how I can make things look pretty with fun loop variables and such. I just hate the lack of specific working examples of many sorts, and the lack of a true tag list. Ok, so there is a brief tag list, but this is hardly comprehensive. It is safe to say I’m pretty confused.

  I’m pretty sure that Typo (at least last year) just used rails views and you grabbed stuff from the database. It was super simple and awesome. Liquid is sort of like that, but a whole lot more confusing. I could be totally wrong though, but whatever Typo used, it was pretty painless.

• Mephisto is young. It is only officially around version 0.7.3. It does not have its complete feature set yet, however it (seems) to be extremely stable. Except when it comes to plugins. I have yet to make a single plugin work. I have tried with both the official version and the svn trunk. For being so young though, Mephisto sure is awesome.

I really want to move to Mephisto as soon as possible. My layout is almost totally ported. The main problems have to do with a couple peculiarities with liquid templates and issues with plugins. At this point it looks exactly the same, but when you click the kitty, there is nothing in the top box, and that is no fun.

In totally separate news, all of the javacsript effects on the site have been changed to mootools. I figured out a very silly way of keeping the top box hidden on load. A very silly way. You should (hopefully) be saving a whole bunch of loading time because of this change.

**Yes, I realize that this is possible in WordPress, as long as you have a tagging plugin to replace traditional category functionality. Still, Mephisto’s sections offer much more customization then WordPress’s categories without any plugins.