Here it is, the release that we've been working hard to get pushed. Immortus is a huge improvement over the 0.5 release. We've finally got a really solid system with some of the most intuitive features you'll ever use in a publishing system. Here is an overview of Immortus' feature-set:
Asset Management Including 'Buckets'
We'd like to think that our asset management system is probably the best you'll find in any CMS/Blogging application. No, we didn't pack it with every feature you could possibly handle, we packed it with the features you need and integrated seamlessly into the publishing workflow.
We've got Buckets. What are Buckets you ask? Well, it's a temporary place you can toss some assets while browsing in the asset manager. Lets say you wanted to go back through all the logos you've ever done and write an article on those. Maybe you also wanted to include some website screenshots too to show how awesome you really are? Well the bucket is perfect for this. Just go through your assets and click the little green check to have it instantly show up in your bucket. When your done collecting the assets you think you want to publish with, head over to the new article page and the files that you just added to your bucket are right there waiting for you!
Find information fast
Sometimes it's not the flashy features that tend to help the most, it's the really subtle ones. We've tried to make it as easy as possible to help find the stuff you need in Mephisto by adding filtering wherever possible. You can filter articles by sections, tags and searches on the title and body. The asset manager also gets it's own unique filtering capabilities.
Easier to convert from other Blogging/CMS Systems
Rick has spent a lot of time getting our conversion scripts beefed up and making sure they are properly working. We now have converters for Wordpress, Typo, and Textpattern. We want to make it as easy as possible for you to start using Mephisto and to also bring your old data with you.
We challenge users of other blogging/cms systems to take Mephisto for a spin. It only takes a few minutes to get it setup on your local machine so you can play around with it. We're confident that you'll think Mephisto rocks 6 different kinds of ass and you just may decide to ditch your current system.
Wait, there's more!
There is so much more in Mephisto that I haven't talked about. This is stuff you really need to experience for yourself. Get rocking and let us know how it goes!
Our plans for the next version
We improved the theme system a lot for 0.6. We moved all theme related stuff to the file system so you no longer have to upload every image you use in your theme through the admin. However, for the 0.7 release of Mephisto we really want to concentrate on greatly improving the theme system. It's in pretty good shape right now, but it has experienced some growing pains. We have plans to work on Liquid includes, real theme management, integrated tag help system, easy importing, and anything else we think needs improving.
Well, I've rambled enough, grab the 0.6 Immortus release here: Download Mephisto 0.6 Immortus
Well done guys, this release is really great. I've been watching this evolve through CVS and the last two revisions made some neat changes.
A couple of questions if you dont mind:
Is there some way to fine tune the page caching? I have Dan's last.fm plugin displaying my recent track list but the cached page stops it from being updated. Just wondering if there is anything I can do about it?
Do you have any thoughts on expanding the comments functionality at all? I'd like to see the ability to preview comments (live preview?) before posting them and also to be able to edit your own comments (maybe for a restricted time only).
If this isn't the correct place to post these questions then I apologise. Great work so far on this excellent tool, I'm really enjoying watching it evolve.
I want to improve the comment administration are, but as far as the ability to edit comments I don't think we'll see that any time soon, if at all. This would be hard to do because users don't have an account. I suppose you could assign the user a session entry and then have the ability to implement editing.
Live preview for comments: Dan has "implemented live preview":http://www.danwebb.net/2006/8/27/why-mephisto here. You might give him a shout to see how he implemented it.
Page caching isn't my area of expertise so I'll leave it to those who are better qualified.
Thanks for the comments :-)
Dan's using custom javascript for that I believe. Using Liquid for the public pages makes it very challenging to use ajax, since there's no guarantee the site's theme will have the correct HTML structure to hook into. Right now, Mephisto doesn't require the use of any javascript (on the public side).
Regarding page caching, there have been some ideas thrown around regarding regular sweeping. This will probably require a cron job though.
Hello, I was looking for a demo. The screenshots look good, but would be nice have a "real" look.
So, is there a URL where I can try it ?
not yet.
Great work Rick and Justin and contributers!
Tanc: I just posted some custom mephisto capistrano tasks that I use to my blog. One of theme handles clearing page caching...
http://depixelate.com/2006/8/31/mephisto-capistrano-tasks
metaweblog api??? is it there yet???
Or should someone start tp work on it??
It's in trunk. It wasn't as stable as I liked, and I don't really know ActionWebService all that well. So be my guest.
Good!
Any advice for upgrading an existing Mephisto install?
Any chance we could see some documentation on the new importers? TextPattern, specifically...
I would love to see a URL where I can try and login as an admin. I'll give this one a spin ;when I tried the last one the posted entries were not appearing on the home page for some reason.
-=- Neeraj
Nice, I think more attention should go to fixing bugs instead of adding new features. After all its better to have a stable core than have one that is buggy. I haven't noticed any so far, but I got alot when I update my svn. Other than that mephisto is badass keep up the good work and thanks for taking the time to make a free app.
bq. "I haven’t noticed any so far"
We fixed a lot of bugs too, but none of them are as cool as the new Asset Manager :)
Excellent! I really like what I'm seeing in Mephisto's approach.
What's the revision # for .60? 1966? (Last change# 1963)
Brian: I keep "tags":http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/tags for the released versions, as well as a "0.6 stable branch":http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/branches.
Having issues freezing Rails to edge:
touch vendor/rails/REVISION_4894 svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/rails/!svn/vcc/default' svn: Path 'http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails//trunk/railties' is not canonicalized; there is a problem with the client.
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/rails/!svn/vcc/default' svn: Path 'http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails//trunk/actionpack' is not canonicalized; there is a problem with the client.
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/rails/!svn/vcc/default' svn: Path 'http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails//trunk/activerecord' is not canonicalized; there is a problem with the client.
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/rails/!svn/vcc/default' svn: Path 'http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails//trunk/actionmailer' is not canonicalized; there is a problem with the client.
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/rails/!svn/vcc/default' svn: Path 'http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails//trunk/activesupport' is not canonicalized; there is a problem with the client.
svn: REPORT request failed on '/svn/rails/!svn/vcc/default' svn: Path 'http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails//trunk/actionwebservice' is not canonicalized; there is a problem with the client.
Any ideas?
Zack: Thanks I'll check it out. I've not used Capistrano before so I'll see how I go. So far I've set up a perl script that will periodically wipe out all the html files except the 404 and 500 files in the public folder. This will be triggered by a cron task. Not sure if that is a good or bad way to do things, but at least some of the data that needs to be more current will display on my pages properly.
http://mephisto.stikipad.com/help/show/Installing+Mephisto+on+Locomotive
I dragged the Mephisto folder after unzipping and put it inside Locomotive folder. What do I do now?
Sounds good. Too bad I'm not having any luck getting it running :-(
I've followed the instructions to the letter and can't get anything to load. Getting the following error in the log:
MissingSourceFile (no such file to load -- script/../config/../config/routes.rb): .//vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:343:in `load' .//vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:343:in `load' .//vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/routing.rb:930:in `load_routes!' .//vendor/rails/actionpack/lib/action_controller/routing.rb:922:in `reload' .//vendor/rails/railties/lib/dispatcher.rb:99:in `prepare_application' .//vendor/rails/railties/lib/dispatcher.rb:39:in `dispatch' .//vendor/rails/railties/lib/webrick_server.rb:111:in `handle_dispatch' .//vendor/rails/railties/lib/webrick_server.rb:77:in `service' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:104:in `service' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/httpserver.rb:65:in `run' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:173:in `start_thread' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:162:in `start_thread' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:95:in `start' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:92:in `start' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:23:in `start' /usr/local/lib/ruby/1.8/webrick/server.rb:82:in `start' .//vendor/rails/railties/lib/webrick_server.rb:63:in `dispatch' .//vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/servers/webrick.rb:59 /usr/local/lib/ruby/site_ruby/1.8/rubygems/custom_require.rb:27:in `require' .//vendor/rails/activesupport/lib/active_support/dependencies.rb:350:in `require' .//vendor/rails/railties/lib/commands/server.rb:39 script/server:3Any thoughts? Have edge Rails frozen for Mephisto and have all the config in place (and this is on a fresh install too), and I'm not getting anywhere.
Im getting the same error as Scott on a fresh install, I have tried freezing to 4846 and edge, neither improves the situation. Not sure what the issue is, any help would be appreciated.
Try using something other than webrick. Once rails 1.2 comes out, I can focus on a single version and try and work out some of the kinks on it. I use mongrel for all development and deployment now, so I'm not seeing any of these weird issues. If anyone has any fixes I'll take patches.
I had to do two things before being able to test it :
gem install tzinfoCreating the log directory should be handled by running rake db:bootstrap to initialize the db.
I must say that the bucket seams to be a great innovation that I've never seen before.
That did the trick. Thanks Rick!
For whatever reason, I decided that 'why would mongrel behave any different than webrick'? Guess I was wrong.
Could someone paste in ps output for a running instance of Mephisto? I'm curious to see the VSZ and RSS for a running instance that has some traffic and has been up for a while.
Thanks.
Thanks guys, great job!
There are no sections anywhere about the procedure to upgrade from 0.5 to the 0.6 release (or from any release to any other) while preserving one's blog entries.
I am having issues with the time posted. My server time is correct (Pacific time) and when I make a post it is making it actually appear the day before.
When I force the timestamp to say 11:00 AM on today, it actually makes it 3:00 AM today. that's weird.
Other than that, amazing. Although for the bucket functionality, it would be nice if when I click the image in the bucket (or movie, whatever) it automatically inserts the right code for that asset into my post.
Wow, I love the idea of buckets. Great release and it keeps getting better and better. On a sidenote, the download size is 666 (well kb), mmm, some very religious people will be freaking out.
Jay: try setting the timezone to pacific in site settings. it defaults to UTC.
Sean: here's what I'm getting right now. 3 mongrel cluster for mephisto, and single mongrel for beast
Igwe: I swear, the 666k install file was a pure coincidence. I think there are a lot of unused icons in there which may get the ax in a future release.
However, the atom generator tag was on purpose :) Please don't read any more into this stuff than "god damn, rick is a big comic book dork."
Rick, it doesnt matter what time-zone it is, when I create a post, it gets a timestamp muuuch earlier than I actually made it. I just did this:
Set my timezine to pacific, changed a timestamp on an article to 5PM today, and when I look at it in the admin now, it says created at 6AM.
I haven't installed Mephisto yet, but I will tomorrow.
What I relly wanna know is if Mephisto will have any photoblog capabilities in future releases? The asset management looks relly awsome! But will there be any more image management implemented in the future that will make it easier for us photobloggers?
What I would like is versions of photos, thumbnail management (choose what part of an image to make the thumbnail of, etc), exif data (as plugin maybe), full iptc-info extraction from images (photo keywords to tags, copyright info, country/city/place info and browse all this info in categories or whatever...).
You get the idea, I guess you guys have a better idea of what can be accoplished in reality.
Do you know anyone using Mephisto for photoblogging today?
(Excuse my bad english...)
/Per
railser: Yea, I forgot to mention that part. You can just svn up and run 'rake migrate RAILSENV=production'. If you're working with the downloaded versions, set up in another directory than the 0.5 release, copy the themes directory over, use the same DB credentials, and run 'rake migrate RAILSENV=production'. Always back up your database prior to updates.
That should be RAILS-ENV=production (change dash to underscore). Markdown was turning the underscore's to 's