Mephisto— Mephisto 0.5: Thanos Release

Mephisto 0.5: Thanos Release

Posted by rick on August 09 2006 at 11:25 PM

Here it is, the first official release of Mephisto! We are naming this one after Thanos, the Mad Titan. Being a “0.5” release, however, I fully expect there to be bugs. But, the software has been stable enough for several folks to run, even on high traffic sites. I’m still waiting to see how it does on a slashdotting or digging…

I’d like to step through some of the high points of Mephisto for those just tuning in:

Speed

Previous blogging tools I’ve used have left a lot to be desired in this area. Mephisto is aggressively cached using Rails’ page caching mechanism. This means that static HTML files are written, and then served by Apache. There’s no dynamic execution on repeat requests. Cached pages are swept immediately when the database records change, so there shouldn’t be any staleness issues.

Elegance

Thanks to Justin, Mephisto sports a very attractive administrative interface. If it wasn’t for his design talents, I’d still be hacking away on Mephisto in obscurity.

Flexibility

There are a lot of blog tools that handle posting really well. But, I haven’t found any that handle the CMS pages in a way that I like. I think it’s fantastic that someone can use Mephisto to make a site that looks nothing like a blog.

So, check out Mephisto if you’re looking for a new blogging system. We’re pretty comfortable with the core features themselves, but there are definitely things to work on.

Themes and Templating may see a major overhaul, if not significant upgrades. The Liquid templating system is working out very well for us. I see a lot of potential here.
We plan to add asset management to Mephisto as well. We want to make it easy to upload and link photos/files straight from the admin interface.
The next release should have support for the MetaWeblog API, and possibly the Atom API.

So, have at it: http://s3.amazonaws.com/mephisto-blog/mephisto-rel-0.5.tar.gz. I hope you enjoy it as much as Justin and I have enjoyed creating it!

Posted under:

Releases

What other people had to say

Zack 08 10 2006 09:45 AM

Very well done! Mephisto is impressive.

I’m looking forward to the incorporation of the MetaWeblog API which I’ve happily used through textmate ever since watching the textmate blogging video at http://macromates.com/screencast/blogging_take_two.mov. Let me know if I can help in any way to implement the API.

Also, I’ll be moving at least one blog over to mephisto shortly.

Again, well done! Zack
rick 08 10 2006 10:04 AM

Zack: Corey Donohoe says he has it mostly complete. We’ll work on getting this out soon. Watch the list for early notifications if you want to help out.
Jason Morrison 08 10 2006 10:38 AM

This is awesome – great job on all the hard work, guys! I look forward to moving to Mephisto in the near future.
Thomas Aylott 08 10 2006 11:01 AM

Awesome stuff. Pity about the name.

I’ll be moving subtleGradient over as soon as I find two minutes to rub together. (temporal friction being the basis of all my personal projects)

Keep up the great work!
rick 08 10 2006 11:18 AM

The name? Thanos? Thanos eats puny mortals for breakast!
Thomas Aylott 08 10 2006 11:29 AM

Thanos good.

Mephisto, bad.
rick 08 10 2006 01:12 PM

Mephisto: Lord of Chaos

Yea, I’m a comic book dork. This was one of those code names that stuck :)
Bill Katz 08 10 2006 02:10 PM

Congrats on getting to 0.5, although I think starting off with Thanos limits your naming for later releases. You won’t be able to name 1.0 “Thor”.. you’ll have to go to Galactus :)

Is anyone looking into Google Data API in addition to the Atom Publishing Protocol?
Pat 08 10 2006 02:25 PM

Has anyone else here actually downloaded the release? I kind of doubt it.

The INSTALL file doesn’t have installation instructions at all – it’s actually a .tar.gz of mephisto itself. rake db:bootstrap fails with “undefined method `alias_method_chain’ for #<class:activerecord::base>” while loading acts_as_paranoid.
Justin Palmer 08 10 2006 03:40 PM

Hold up their young skadoo. Lets evaluate your situation and the unfortunate steps that got you here.

You downloaded Mephisto. This is where your problem starts, but it’s not exactly the problem. According to the download page, in them big ole bold letters up top it says:

Note: You MUST freeze Rails to revision 4727 for both the stable and edge versions

That solves the bootstrap problem, so your well on your way.

Now, on to your other problem. The INSTALL file doesn’t have the directions. Well, thats my fault. I wanted to give people install instructions that had some type of formatting other than plain text so I put it in the public/install.html file as the INSTALLL file states. It’s the only line in install:

See public/install.html for setup instructions.

So, based on the evidence I’ve presented here, it seems your guilty of not RTFM and Mephisto is cleared of all wrong doing. Although I’m sure it’ll bite you in the ass along the way.

Seriously though, I hope this gets you up and running.
Pat 08 10 2006 04:01 PM

I just downloaded it from the link in this post, which didn’t mention edge at all.

The public/install.html file does state that you need edge…but since the INSTALL file is a tarzip, people won’t know about install.html. In fact I think they just go “wtf?” when they “cat INSTALL” and get a bunch of binary data.

After freezing edge I did get it up and running. Thanks :)

One problem I’ve found is that if I try to publish an article and I set the format settings to Plain HTML I get ‘wrong constant name “Plain HTML”’ No problem with any of the other format options.
Justin Palmer 08 10 2006 04:12 PM

Glad you got it up and running. I checked out the download and indeed the INSTALL file is in some weird format even though in the repository it’s just a plain ole’ text file.

On the Plain html, that is indeed a bug. I’ve filed it now. Thanks :-)
rick 08 10 2006 04:14 PM

Whoa, not sure what happened to INSTALL. This is what it should look like. I’ll get an updated tar up tonight.
rick 08 10 2006 11:51 PM

fyi: INSTALL is fixed. Shows of my l33t tarring skills :)
jonah 08 11 2006 04:45 AM

Are there any plans for any preinstalled themes ?

This would be a winner for lazy ol me (and lots of others im sure :)

jonah
sly 08 11 2006 11:23 AM

when I run rake db:bootstrap I get this error: unable to access log. Please ensure that /home/blah/blog/config/../log/development.log exists and is chmod 666.

I did the command on the revision on 4727.
rick 08 11 2006 03:21 PM

sly: log is in the svn repo. The first time bootstrap is run it will create the log directory for you, so you can safely ignore the message.

jonah: Doing an official Mephisto theme is really up to Justin. I’m sure he will when he finds the time. For now, I’m fine with converting my favorite themes over, like Hemingway. Who knows, maybe we’ll hold a Theme contest or something?
Justin Palmer 08 11 2006 03:32 PM

Mephisto comes with Hemmingway by default, so yeah, there is a pre-installed theme. I do plan on doing a unique Mephisto template one day when the dust settles on other pressing issues. We do welcome ports of other themes though.
sly 08 11 2006 06:43 PM

I probably should have typed down the whole error. When I enter the rake db:bootstrap command I get this.

rake aborted! “undefined method `alias_method_chain’ for #<class:activerecord::base>“
rick 08 11 2006 09:56 PM

sly: please read the install docs on this. The app comes with basic instructions and a pointer to the install page on the wiki You just need edge rails.
sly 08 12 2006 11:46 PM
Alright I got it setup, but I’m getting weird problem with mephisto though it doesn’t show the templates style http://www.mediapad.net. Not only that when I click the comment link it says not found:s. I did change the hidden .htaccess to this.
1. General Apache options #AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi #AddHandler cgi-script .cgi #Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI
RewriteBase /blog RewriteRule ^{$ index.html [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([}.]+)$ $1.html [QSA] RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !blog\.html RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.fcgi [QSA] RewriteRule blog\.html /blog/ [R]
Justin Palmer 08 13 2006 12:30 AM

Sly, your running Mephisto in a subdirectory, try just directly linking to the stylesheet file in your layout template.

http://www.mediapad.net/blog/stylesheets/base.css

We have to look into this more.
sly 08 13 2006 04:43 AM

got that fixed, but when I click the comments link I get page not found.
sly 08 13 2006 06:57 AM

Lol I just set it up on http://www.mediapad.net and everything works fine now, but when I try to publish something I get a long error page saying “NameError in Admin/articlesController#create”. Sorry for spamming my issues:\.
Justin Palmer 08 13 2006 07:45 AM

It’s cool, but It’s probably better to post these on the mailing list so everyone has a chance to help you out and it’s also searchable in case others run into the same errors.
Robby Russell 08 16 2006 08:07 AM

I’ve setup a few sites in the past week and just noticed that one of the bloggers said, “hey, why can’t I tag articles?”

I wasn’t aware that there wasn’t any article tagging. Is this something you plan to add in the near future? With Typo, I’ve almost switched to tags-only from categories and was considering migrating.

Help!?
Dan Smith 10 23 2006 02:12 PM
I'm getting this error when I run rake db:bootstrap:
```
rake aborted!
uninitialized constant ActionController::UrlWriter
```
Can anyone help me?
Mathieu Jobin 02 08 2007 07:27 PM
I’m trying to get the mephistoblog working. I downloaded the trunk version. I freezed edge at 4727 I had to create the log directory and the database.yml file.

and I am getting this error
```
[sepulveda] ~/mephisto$ rake migrate
(in /home/.haslett/somekool/mephisto)
rake aborted!
Regexp anchor characters are not allowed in routing requirements: /[^\/]*/

(See full trace by running task with --trace)
[sepulveda] ~/mephisto$              
```
also note about the Demo link you put on the sidebar of this site. the visit link leads to an error and the login/pass does not work on the admin side.

Mathieu Jobin 02 08 2007 09:39 PM

ok, I freeze with rails 1.2.2 instead and It went further. but still got problem.

[sepulveda] ~/mephisto$ rake migrate
(in /home/.haslett/somekool/mephisto)
rake aborted!
no such file to load -- tzinfo

(See full trace by running task with --trace)
[sepulveda] ~/mephisto$

rick 02 09 2007 12:02 AM
Please use the mephisto list for bug reports. A few things you can do on your own first though:
- Install the latest version of Mephisto. 0.5 is the very first release. Yikes.
- Read the installation directions. They state the need for the tzinfo gem.