Is Mephisto dead? I see much more Typo activity recently than Mephisto. It’s the same with most open-source Rails apps. Development is cyclothymic – people get excited in the beginning, then slow down (or completely stop) – probably work on some “for pay” project, then get excited again (when the paid project is completed maybe?), then slow down again and so on. Substruct, Collaboa, Typo, RadRails, Project RIDE-ME, Active Merchant and many others… I don’t see this happening in Java world and I miss the “die hard” Java enthusiasm in the Rails community. —Nikolay Kolev, comments on previous article
Nope, it’s been on hold since the end of 2006. Mephisto has a tiny development team, and we’re both busy trying to launch a web service. We have 0 funding, so we’ve basically been devoting our “OSS project time” (and “sleep time”) towards Lighthouse instead.
I’ve found that most of the ‘successful’ open source projects have some source of real funding. Either there’s a company that needs the product enough to fund/hire the team, or they make enough through custom installs or commercial versions. Other than a handful of small consulting gigs and some donations, Mephisto has been purely a labor of love for us.
What’s going on right now:
- I’m entertaining the idea of extending to the core team, but I don’t feel there’s been anyone that seems interested in devoting the time.
- However, I’m thinking seriously of extracting a few things out as “official plugins” and opening up access on those small areas. The current candidate is XML-RPC support.
- There’s a small 0.7.4 update with a few security issues and annoying bugs fixed
- There’s an edge version with some notable new features (plugin admin, plugin support for RHTML/HAML templates, and soon: a multi-site admin)
- Once Lighthouse goes out of beta, we’ll have an official bug tracker.
- Core team doesn’t haven’t to mean “svn commit access” either. It could also mean “ticket overlord” or something.
- DNS info is currently being transferred to moniker…
However, Justin and I are committed to keeping Mephisto true to its roots. We’re not going to turn it into another bloated CMS, or a community blogging tool. It’s also not a kickstart to your rails app development. It’s strictly going to remain a kick ass publishing tool. Further features/integration should be done through the power of hyperlinks or APIs (exposed through custom Liquid drops).
xml-rpc support would be incredible.
He doesn’t see it happen in the java world because no one gives a toss about java development, even those silly enough to do it.
Todd – there IS xml-rpc support. I don’t personally use it, so the code that’s in there is what’s been submitted to be from others. I’m hoping some superstar will step up and start kicking ass in that area.
pwnd, we expect nothing but a kick ass web publishing tool, or i’ll get quellhorst and we’ll chainsaw you and justin.
Mephisto is my GOD!
(j/k).
Honestly, you guys have done great things here. Please, keep it simple, fast and elegant. Let others add all of the trappings of bloat via plugins. Mephisto scratches 90% of the itch that I have right now, and the other 10% either I can do myself, or is not all that important.
Keep up the good work guys! I’d help, but I am swamped with pay gigs right now…
I agree with Tsykoduk, mainly why I like mephisto so much is because its simple and not bloated like a fat toad cough wordpress cough. I hope you let negative comments just roll over your shoulder because their are people who understand you have other projects to tend to and that its only a two man team. In my opinion you both need a well deserved vacation to mars, have fun.
Rick and Justing:
You guys have done a great job coding mephisto. But I will strongly disagree with mephisto project execution. i.e. Not getting folks on board when there were lot of interest from the community. This doesn’t mean “commit rights” but more “delegate” and “try not to do all things by your self” instead focus on the docs i.e “how to” so others “can develop things” and contribute.. focus on building a community NOT features.. Features will come when there is a community. But this is not really mephisto specific syndrome.. you will find this in “ALL Rails Gems as well as projects” Here is how I see it.
Ruby landscape is littered with half baked projects and broken “documentation” projects. Add to that the “EFF YOU!” attitude engendered by the rails core and you have a discouraging mix.
Maybe Ruby/rails is really easy to start a project with, but it has always been intriguing to me that there NEVER is any good documentation for 99% of the projects. this is not anything new. If anything, they’re following the trail of dashed expectation to the letter.
the sad cycle goes something like this:
Why is it that most rails “producers” claim that their product will make life easy for end users and then end up telling users to read the source because they just can’t be bothered with the discipline of taking documentation just as seriously as the code part?
why is this behaviour so endemic to Ruby and especially Rails based projects? I always wonder. It almost seems like the Ruby community does essentially throw away stuff for the initial rush of releasing something or to use the project as a stepping stone for recognition, but there never is any long term commitment or expectation management. Ie Hype outpaces reality by a long margin.. why? why doth thou mock us thus o Ruby afficionados?
is it because there is a steep wall which people hit and then are just too busy fighting it to actually write any useable docs? and please, function defs are NOT documentation. I can’t belive people actually accept that as proper documentation. That is like step 0. (and even that is sometimes sorely lacking or outright ridiculous)
anyhoo, sorry for the rant.. I think I’m done following this blog. I’ll see mephisto around when something useable for the supposed “audience” actually gets there. And for the record, the audience is NOT hard-core ruby developers (they are just fine editing a bazillion code snippets per rails project) as per the initial post.
I wasn’t trying to pass Mephisto off as a shining example. The project is definitely severely lacking in some areas, especially documentation. But, I’ve always tried to be as welcoming as I can for anyone eager to help.
But, Justin and I are currently in the middle of Jedi training. When we’re done, we’ll be back to rescue you and Han from Jabba the Hut.
We never developed Mephisto for the hard-core rubyists. One of our principals with Mephisto was that we wanted it to be a great publishing tool, not a great Rails publishing tool.
The documentation shouldn’t be written by us, it should be written by the community. We’re too familiar with the inner workings in order to write good user-centric documentation.
What gets me, is that 80% of the people who complain about no documentation, don’t care to document their efforts or attempt to help with the documentation, instead they will complain about no documentation, blog about it, do whatever. This totally misses the point of open source.
Mephisto does what we want it to fairly well now. I’ve not had the need for new features nor have I run up on any serious bugs. That isn’t to say we’re not jumping right back on Mephisto when we get our finances in order and Lighthouse out the door.
Right now we’re trying to start a company, launch a product, continue our commitment to the open source community, do enough client work to keep us a float, and keep our bills paid. It’s a grueling schedule and a lot of hard work.
Rick said that we have been considering opening up Mephisto to a core-team, we’re about to open up a real bug tracker to help us continue our efforts, there is a new version in the repo, we’re still blogging here with community updates, and we never considered laying down on Mephisto.
Have you bothered to check out the Wiki? Better yet, have you bothered to improve it?
Sorry to be on a rant myself, but comments like yours make me question why I do this stuff to begin with considering I’m barely making ends meet as it is.
We thank everybody who has donated their time to the project, either through documentation, code, or help on the mailing list or IRC room. It’s those people who make it easier for us to keep working on Mephisto.
I was looking for a killer blogging tool for our church (in spite of the non-community blog tool). I looked at radiant… not bad, but not as full featured and stumbled on mephisto.
I have been very happy. It does almost everything that I would want. I would love to contribute.
I have noticed some stability issues… I crashes once every other day (there are memory errors in the mongrel log). Outside of that which is manageable, i love it. It is simple enough for our worship leader and the co-pastor to use (with Texttile).
Wishes (and maybe it does it, I have not stumbled on it): 1) lock down blog pages to be particular people. (like a paid service, but for us to limit visibility to certain teams) & a simple login. 2) publish changes to .. (like sharepoint notifications) 3) tag help in the editor (Radiant does this). Type YYY => renders as YYY. 4) ok there are only three. Very nice tool.
Thanks for sharing this with the rest of us. David
Justin:
Define publishing tool? Pumping out information from a database is a publishing tool when that data is about “company financial” or a “calender information”.. Users sharing audio/video snippets do you consider them publishing materials? does your view of publishing tool should take care of such content? i.e back end of YouTube is a publishing tool? Publishing tool is everything and nothing… Publishing tool is defined by the product.. Getting Feedback from your visitor should be included in the publishing tool?
Ok I buy that docs should be written by users. But what is it going to guide them to write such docs? So you expect regular user/developers to read the i.e feed_controller.rb and understand and contribute. Well as I said before you need to know how to delegate jobs if you want the community to work for you. You need to guide the community by providing code with some 1 liner comments.. if you seriously expect someone to understand what is going on in your code. Lets take the feed_controller there is NOT A SINGLE LINE OF COMMENT! Yes its about feed but how and what the heck is going on in the code and how would one go about modifying it or produce document for modifying it.
No they don’t miss the point of open source. Rule number 1 of open source is You decided that you will make the code public, second you want folks to look at your code and use your application, third and most important to do that you need to tell folks how did you do it so that they contribute back. And please don’t give me open source jargon.. any serious open source developer will have hard time to see the state of rails and it status of documentation and the projects that are laying around rubyforge with half baked documentation. “Yes I developed this code cos I had blah blah need and if you were to use it you should figure this out on your own. Well for the love of code .. keep the project to yourself .. no one has the time to contribute if you are not going to guide them to contribute. If the developer is looking for attention .. i strongly suggest they look somewhere else then create projects in rubyforge with their pesky code with no docs”
YES, you guys have done a good job and its good to see you guys are starting companies and involved many OS projects but at the same time you are spreading yourself thin by being everywhere and nowhere i.e lack of focus. I really thing you have some good stuff but I hate to see this being—ohh lets do some here.. lets do some there.. and none gets done well…
I checked everything and extended mephisto, but the project is clearly stalling .. you can see it in your lighthouse bug tracking that mephisto supposed to have a 1.0 release March 15th. Yes Yes you had lot of other things to do.. but its you who decided that the release date will be xxx.. So again same old rails culture – Promise and no follow on delivery ..
I am sorry and there is no bitterness from my side with this post but Its a bit frustrating to see things getting wasted for lack of focus or lack of openness. You could have build the core team when things were happening .. Just look at the statistics things started to drop ..
http://groups.google.com/group/MephistoBlog/about
Dude don’t take any of my comment personally. These are just random rants.. thats all.
I’m really reluctant to respond again, but OK, I’ll go another round with you.
It seems you’ve already got your mind made up about Ruby developers, us, and this project. I’m basically getting that you think Ruby developers only write code for the attention and give two squirts of piss about whoever else decides to use code we write.
I was a community member for Prototype. The code wasn’t documented, but I experimented and learned how to use it. I then, without any delegation from Sam organized a successful documentation effort by asking for help from other community members who were ready and willing to help. It went well, and it strengthened the community. So it doesn’t take developers delegating community responsibility.
Your ranting about user documentation but throw in the “feed_controller”. Users don’t learn how to use an application based on reading the code, they learn how to use it through the interface. And, if your a developer reading the feed_controller and can’t see what it’s doing, I would suggest you need a good Ruby and Rails book, not code comments. The method names are practically sentences.
What you see in the LH bug tracker for Mephisto wasn’t a hard deadline or one set after a lot of discussion. It was just where it was set at for the time being, probably while testing Lighthouse.
I can’t extract anything useful out of your comments though, other than your distaste for the Ruby community. Anonymitity is a powerful weapon.
Our mailing list is alive and well Our Irc room is full of helpful folks (#mephisto) Our wiki has some great documentation
If you want to continue the conversation, I’m available through email encytemedia AT gmail.
I’ll respond to the only relevant bit. Yes: mephisto has stalled. And it’s not the first time. It went through many slow periods during the first 8 months of life while it was little more than a public subversion repository. We always come back, charged with ideas to implement and bugs fix that have been gnawing at us for weeks or months.
David:
1) lock down blog pages to be particular people.
Eh, sorry, that’s plugin territory :) It gets in the way of Mephisto’s aggressive caching.
2) publish changes to .. (like sharepoint notifications)
I’d love to get a rest API in 1.0. Not sure how important that is since XML-RPC is what 99% of the clients use. Anyways, Mephisto outputs atom, surely sharepoint can consume it in some way?
3) tag help in the editor
Agreed.
I can see that I am not getting through here :-) If you read again my posts you will NOT find
- criticism about mephisto code base or mephisto has a bad quality code. - criticism about the founders commitment to the code
What you will find is the following
- Problem of execution - Lack of documentataion - Lack of focus - The rails culture
I hope its clear. With that in mind lets try to answer some of your comments :-)
- If you open up a blog where anyone can comment. Then yes anonymous comments will be there. You can’t start singing/shouting its unfair if you have opened up the blog for anonymous comments can you? Couple of suggestions
a. close the comments b. create registration for comments c. close the thread
Again.. if you are in the process of providing LH as a service to professional buyers and you announce that in your blogs i.e. look we got Active Reload and we got a version of public LH running
- you invite folks to visit you -users go there and find out that- you are planning on a 1.0 Mephisto release March 15th -great!—> And now you can’t deliver and you have bunch of execuse (which are fully valid). But the problem i see here is you are seeking attention. Honestly my friend it will be very difficult for you to do real business. In the real world there is a thing call professionalism. Don’t promise things that you can not deliver period and when you do promise things count in all the day-to-day problem that involves in terms of delivering it.feed_controller is an example nothing more.. But just look at the whole codebase you will see the lack of one liner docs. Probably this is not your coding practice but – Do say that out loud so we don’t waste our time on such code! Why is it a problem to say that? Method names are sentences off course .. i forgot thats the documentation style rails follow… Try selling such solution to an enterprise customer.
You guys are doing lot of cool stuff as I mentioned above as well as in my previous comments. Just look at Ricks involvement on projects in his SVN repo. Yes lot of small plugins, mongrel, LH, Mephisto, Beast.. Active Reload.. Rails core .. Is it not spreading thin..lack of focus.. no time for documentation.. feature before community.. the rails way.. :-) Some projects will suffer thats all some are already doing.
I have no distaste towards ruby community. I have a distaste how things are being marketed and how things are being delivered. It has done some super cool stuff in web development and i praise ruby community for it. But now that rails and ruby community got all the attention that it was asking for it is having a hard time to deliver things.. thats all.. Just look at the railswiki and rails documentation project.. all the money raised but nothings happening..
I don’t want to make anyone mad here nor I am ranting here.. My arguments above are all based on facts and commonsense. So I don’t want to waste your time or my time anymore.
Mr. Nameless has left the building :
) Isn’t Elvis from your part of the neighborhood :)cheers
Any mentions of the LH tracker were to get any interested users to kick the tires on the beta before we launched. Nothing more. Tires have been kicked though, thanks everyone.
Regarding my numerous plugins: that’s right, they are mostly just code dumps from some experiment I was trying. I throw them up there with little mention and a liberal license for others to take advantage of. I could just leave them out if that implies a lifetime devotion though, but I think enough people get good use out of them.
I can’t really make any comments about others’ rails/ruby projects, I just know that some do excellent work, others are progressing, and others just plain suck.
You mention a 0.7.4 release but the official release seems to be 0.7.3 ?
Yea, it’s in SVN only still. I actually made another small update too. I suggest you deploy on the stable 0.7 branch though. It’ll always be the latest and won’t get any updates other than bug fixes or maybe some tiny new feature.
@Nameless – Reading your comments I doubt you have been involved in any “real world” enterprise level software development projects yourself or any project management for that matter. Your comment on professionalism and never quoting a delivery date that isn’t met are totally ludicrous. Project deadlines and delivery dates get moved all of the time due to the complexity of large and small scale project management and the many factors that can impact a project being run in the “real world”.
Nameless wrote “Method names are sentences off course .. i forgot thats the documentation style rails follow… Try selling such solution to an enterprise customer.” If you have done any “real world” support of third party written code bases in the “enterprise” then you would realise that often code comments can be misleading and wrong. Therefore the only true way to understand what the code is doing is to read the code and if you are a decent developer then reading the code will be just as easy as reading a comment. And if you did work at the “enterprise” level of business you will find that the trend in the software development world in general is to write more self describing code than to write a lot of superfluous comments.
I fully understand your position. Unfortunatly it seems that it is expected that softwar is just “there”, get it use it apply it and do not even dare to ask for a decent payment for it. We do have around 900 downloads/day for our software and selling in the 3-5 area each months. So let’s see that 900 * 20 = 27000 a bit over 0.11 promille. So what do we have to do. Looking on everything else to get some income, and rest development (more than less) But well it’s ok I guess to pay for everything else….
Happy Rubying Friedrich
I LOVE free toys…
Well, my 2 cents is this: it took me all of about 10 minutes to do some non-trivial modifications to import tags from Wordpress’s Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin instead of using categories.
Which is to say: I’ve never used a blog platform that’s designed (mostly) the way I’d do it.
Which is to say: Good job! :)
It sucks that people come here and rant some more instead of showing some understanding. If you want “active” as in “right now” get Typo, if you want features get WordPress. Do some of the critics realize that they might actually be convincing Rick and Justin not to work on opensource as much? They certainly wouldn’t have to deal with these “I am entitled” whiners if they charged money. At least all support would be tied to “real customers”.
If you don’t like the state of affairs chip in. It’s the only solution. Otherwise, keep it to yourself.
Thanks so much for mephisto. You’ve created an extremely useful and flexible piece of software. People pay lots of money for much less software. There will always be people that complain rather than actually doing something productive to help. Just ignore them. Or, maybe you need a FAQ with an entry like this one from gentoo linux.
I think it’s ridiculous to complain about an open source project. The Internet is full of half-baked projects with no documentation. Most of them are that way. If that bothers you than stick to established projects with huge user bases and commercial backing, whether they be open source or not.
We’ve all had those moments of wishing for more documentation—I certainly wouldn’t begrudge anybody to ask politely for it. But to come out and rant that it is this huge problem with the Rails community is like saying they should never release their project at all; that its worse than useless. Obviously you don’t think that, but that’s how it comes off. Bottom line is this, open source is about scratching your own itch. If your itch is documentation, do something about it.
I know this thread is dead, but I have to say that you guys attacked Mr. Nameless instead of taking his criticism as constructive, which it seemed to mostly be, at least in his first comment. His main theme was, “focus on building a community NOT features.. Features will come when there is a community.” and this is absolutely true.
He posted flame bait, and we (doped up on caffeine most likely) fell for it.
I agree that the rants should be mined for whatever constructive points can be found therein. Self-commenting code has much appeal and many charms, but I feel that comments have their place, especially for the sake of rdoc pages. And I don’t claim to be a seasoned coder, but I disagree with Danny – reading the code is often not quite as easy as reading comments or wikis. When you consider the incredible efforts these gents and the rest of this funky community have made to save us from repeating ourselves, you will agree that it would be disrespectful to fail at establishing a widespread comprehension of what all the code does. That way, other programmers will less frequently engage in needless recreation of systems that are well-tested and efficient.
As Rick pointed out, a feature often won’t come through until the itch has gotten less bearable over weeks and weeks. By helping others find this code, comprehend it, and dissect and implement it, we can give some of those weeks back, and reap the benefits they bring to the community (whether they be code, comment, critique, or the introduction of more collaborators who can better contribute).
But while I agree that writing more comments would probably be a smart move for these ninjas, I find it supremely ironic that this discussion came where it did, when it did. Is lighthouse not an endeavor designed to fight exactly these weaknesses in the Ruby world? The stagnation that comes after things get a little too self-referential (and self-congratulatory)? The dry philosophy begs you to put those glittery clean pieces of code out of your mind and address new problems with new solutions one ticket at a time. And soon, with a menagerie of beacons, doing so will be much much closer to plausible for us mortals.
I’m loving it! Keep it going guys
This post prompted me to do something I had been meaning to do for awhile, donate. Especially to those free open source projects that have asked for it. Rails, Prototype, Scriptaculous, Memphisto, and Beast have all saved me time, made me money, and improved my programming career and personal lifestyle :)
- THANKS
Rick and Jason, you have done a fantastic job. I’m particularly grateful that you stuck to what you do well – coding and design. Instead of getting mired in documentation, you continued to improve Mephisto and turned out something Totally Awesome.
The community isn’t perfect, but it has many successes, and I think that’s what really counts.
As for the documentation: I have to apologize because I am a member of this community who has made some efforts to improve the documentation to get people going but have stalled out on it numerous times. So, if the docs are bad or missing – sorry!
Really though, the community is pretty active. There are numerous messages in the mailing list every day and the 35 or so people on IRC at any time. Ask questions and you’ll figure things out faster.
good