10:38p.m. Mephisto — First Impressions

So I have been spending a little time playing with Mephisto, a very promising rails CMS. Here are some initial observations…

• It has sections, just like TextPattern. However, Mephisto itself seems to be a bit confused about what a section actually is. Is a section a category? Is a section a separate website section? The beautiful part is that Mephisto is flexible enough so that you can use sections for whatever you would like. It can be category, or it can be a site section. It can use blog posts, or page posts. It can pretty much do whatever you want, without getting too confusing.**

• Mephisto uses Liquid Templates. Liquid was created by the same guy who made Typo. One thing about Typo I loved was its template system. I don’t remember what it was like exactly, but I never had any trouble with it. Liquid isn’t exactly the same. Liquid doesn’t have much documentation, and some aspects are rather confusing. I love how flexible it is, and how I can make things look pretty with fun loop variables and such. I just hate the lack of specific working examples of many sorts, and the lack of a true tag list. Ok, so there is a brief tag list, but this is hardly comprehensive. It is safe to say I’m pretty confused.

  I’m pretty sure that Typo (at least last year) just used rails views and you grabbed stuff from the database. It was super simple and awesome. Liquid is sort of like that, but a whole lot more confusing. I could be totally wrong though, but whatever Typo used, it was pretty painless.

• Mephisto is young. It is only officially around version 0.7.3. It does not have its complete feature set yet, however it (seems) to be extremely stable. Except when it comes to plugins. I have yet to make a single plugin work. I have tried with both the official version and the svn trunk. For being so young though, Mephisto sure is awesome.

I really want to move to Mephisto as soon as possible. My layout is almost totally ported. The main problems have to do with a couple peculiarities with liquid templates and issues with plugins. At this point it looks exactly the same, but when you click the kitty, there is nothing in the top box, and that is no fun.

In totally separate news, all of the javacsript effects on the site have been changed to mootools. I figured out a very silly way of keeping the top box hidden on load. A very silly way. You should (hopefully) be saving a whole bunch of loading time because of this change.

**Yes, I realize that this is possible in WordPress, as long as you have a tagging plugin to replace traditional category functionality. Still, Mephisto’s sections offer much more customization then WordPress’s categories without any plugins.