Mephisto

Mephisto 0.8, “Drax”, is out, and the source is now hosted at our friends, Github.

There are many fixes, rewrites and improvements in the codebase, and development is actively continuing! Rather than talk about what’s new, I’m going to gush about git. We’ll cover what’s new in a future post.

Git, and github, allow for truly distributed development, and is a big deal for Mephisto development – as you can see in this graph of activity:

You can download release 0.8 from tarball or git checkout, or live on the edge.

The best thing about using Github is that you can easily fork Mephisto for yourself, or see what other people are working on and help them out. The idea of an ‘official’ repository becomes murky; the canonical repository in distributed source control is more of a convention.

I’ve decided to make another quick Mephisto release for two reasons. One: there are a few annoying bugs that have been fixed. But, the big news is that Rails 1.2 RC1 has been released. This means that as the Rails team starts working towards Rails 2.0, I won’t be dragging the Mephisto users along for the ride.

So, if you happen to be on a host that has the RC1 installed, you’re good to go. Since no sane host will do that until the official release, you can start freezing to the Rails 1.2 branch in SVN (more info in the Download area).

We're proud to announce the official 0.7 Noh-Varr release. We've worked hard on this release squashing bugs, enhancing the experience, and adding features that will make your life easier. We've cleaned up our converters, made it easier to manage comments and spam, enhanced our templating system with new tags, made it easier to apply a new look and feel to your site with our new theme manager, and many other things. Mephisto was already the best publishing system ever, and now we've upped the ante, but I think we're gonna stick with the tag line.

Note: A quick hotfix was just deployed. the_mug in #mephisto finally figured out the odd issue where rake db:bootstrap wasn't finding the tzinfo library when it was frozen in /vendor. If you're having an issue with tzinfo, either make the small change, copy over the new lib/tasks/bootstrap.rake file, update from subversion, or re-download the 0.7.2 archive.

I’ve made some more fixes, retagged 0.7.0 in Subversion, and uploading a tar.gz version in the Download area. I’ve also taken the liberty of freezing tzinfo, which isn’t normally frozen with the subversion releases. Keep in mind, this is really a pre-release. There are UI tweaks to be made, and probably a few bugs here and there. And now that the liquid templating area has gone through some refactorings, I want to document all the new filters and drops. If you’re a bit nosey, you probably noticed my half-ass start to the documentation.

By the way, be sure to read this note in the download area regarding edge rails:

As of this writing, the absolute latest edge can be used. There is a bug with some versions of MySQL, however. If you get an error regarding Mysql::Result, then use rev 5218.

If anyone wants to help with the documentation effort, let me know. The reason I’m not using the wiki is I want an official copy on this site. And, I’d like to have something to include with future releases so that the docs are accessible locally.

• Use ActionController::AbstractRequest.relative_url_root for sites under a root path like /blog
• fix odd timezone bug when saving articles
• fix bug with <typo:code> macro
• bad feed urls raise ActiveRecord::RecordNotFound, and return 404 in production
• dont bomb out on comment events without an event body
• fix bug where you’re unable to delete an empty comment
• Ignore drafts and articles published in the future when searching.
• sanitize posted comments
• Fix bug where atom feed content from textile was double encoded
• sanitize atom feed content.

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

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We (well Rick mostly) have been pretty busy getting Mephisto ready for 0.6. Our goal with 0.6 was to get basic asset management in and we've done that for the most part. There is much more to come in this area though.

Rick and I have talked about ways to integrate, rather, let you integrate, custom services such as Flickr, You Tube, etc, into the asset management area. These third party services wouldn't be going into the core, but we'd like to give you the opportunity to pimp your Mephisto with whatever bling you deem necessary if you so choose. I'll talk about this more later, but here is an overview of what we've managed to get done in preparation for the 0.6 release, probably due out early next week or so.

Asset Management

I've talked in detail about assets already. In addition to what's already been said, we've added tagging support. I've still got some house cleaning to do in this area, but it'll be complete before 0.6.

Article Tagging, Filtering, and Improvements

Articles got some basic tag love. You can now filter articles by section, tags, title, or body. We've also made some minor improvements to the paging links, printing out the page numbers instead of just 'Next Page' and 'Previous page'. You can also jump to an article on your site from the admin now.

Template Liberation

We didn't have this planned until 0.7, but Rick beefed up on milk and cookies and managed to get the templates completely moved to the file system instead of the half and half mix we have in 0.5. This is great because it means that you no longer have to upload every image file you use in your design/css. I'm probably gonna rework the UI here in the future because the sidebar has real potential to run away from you fairly quickly depending on how many assets you have.

Small fixes and improvements

In addition to some of the major upgrades I've listed, we've also fixed numerous bugs and made tiny improvements here and there.

• Liquid gets {{ ifchanged }}, {{article.excerpt}}, {{ unless }}, and {{ format_date: 'mdy' }} for month, day, and year.
• Filters have been improved
• Awesomeness increased by at least 30%.

Stay tuned for 0.6!

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!