Steve Smith, an accomplished Wordpress hacker, recently tweaked his design and migrated to Mephisto. It’s nice to have another beautiful site in the collective. When Steven first approached Justin and I about making the switch, I worked hard on the backend to make it flexible enough to meet his needs. We finished fleshing out how the archives would work, rewrote the Dispatcher to provide the unique permalinks that Steve uses, and added article tagging. We’re still not done, but orderedlist.com looks fantastic. Great job!
Next on the list is LocusFocus, by Mark Daggett. The site serves as a homepage for the LocusFocus studio, while providing a blog for RAM and his plugins. Another great looking and unique Mephisto site, with some quite interesting photography. Also, check out RAM, Mark’s Ruby Asset Manager. Always nice to see more great OSS rails apps out there.
So, maybe Mephisto has lost that lightweight blog engine feeling. I think it’s evident that we’ve been focusing on writing a kick ass publishing engine and trying to get break away from the standard articles/archives/tags/category blog feel. We’ve worked hard to keep it simple enough to run one of those straightforward blogs if you want, but Mephisto really starts to shine once you start expanding. I’ve also heard rumors of a Mephisto installation hosting several thousand blogs, how cool is that?
Though Justin and I have been taking a bit of a break from Mephisto, we’ll be back in 2007 and we hope to see all you there with us. Happy holidays and all that…
i've tried to get my rendereing plugin Saucy (check it) working with Mephisto, but to no avail (due to routing problems).
weepy
Are we going to see those improvements/changes in Mephisto any time soon?
—clc
Btw. I just love Mephisto.
What improvements or changes?
“When Steven first approached Justin and I about making the switch, I worked hard on the backend to make it flexible enough to meet his needs.”
I mean those changes.
Well, he made the site, so those changes must be in :) There are a few things he implemented as plugins though.
Neat. I love Orderedlist.com’s stuff, and came here from his site. Wondering where to find the “Why Mephisto” (which btw is also the name of a shoe brand).
For all the developments in WordPress it’s only with 2.0 that it has an inbuilt cache, or the WP-Static that that Spanish-ish guy has done in poor English.
I have been with MT for a while because it creates static pages. So it works for me. I now have about 1800 pages over the last three years on a private blog with a loyal audience. I generate all the static stuff on MT on my local system, rsync it with ftp, and bam. No ‘cache’ or anything required. Plus with MT 3.34, I can now also use fastcgi, which in my case is useless as I generate everything on my localhost anyway.
That said, if orderedlist runs on Mephisto, I am surely interested. Any thoughts on why one should spend time learning Mephisto? Does it create static pages?
Mephisto uses the “funky caching” technique (popularized by the PHP.net site IIRC). Pages are cached on the first access and then served by your web server from then on (assuming your web server’s rewrite rules are set up correctly). Editing an article will automatically expire the correct files, which are then re-cached on the next hit.
I think this serves as an excellent compromise between dynamic page views and statically cached sites. There’s no rebuilding phase, yet the site can handle diggs with no problems. The new prototype site and the rails weblog both run on the same instance of Mephisto, and took on a simultaneous digging and slashdotting. At that point it depends on how well your web server scales.
I think the main downside to Mephisto is the memory usage of the Rails framework. Memory is cheap, unless you’re on a shared host.