5:46a.m. A Sexier Mephisto

Mephisto is a fantastic CMS. I have really enjoyed using it, and love the way it is set up and organized.

However, I’ve always thought that it was missing a couple of key features.

First, there is no form of pagination for lists of articles, including the front page. Once you’re done with the front page, you must use the archives.

Second, it doesn’t provide a full listing of archives. Archives are only listed by month. There is no way to grab all of your posts, only a limited number of posts.

However, now there are two great plugins to add in these features.

First, Sven Fuchs has written a Paged Article Lists to give lists of posts (such as your front page) pagination links. You can see this in action at the bottom of my index page. I helped (read: was really irritating) in bugfixing it so it should work smoothly.

Next, there is now a great Full Archives plugin (also by Sven Fuchs) to allow your main archives page show a full listing of all of your posts. You can see this in action on my past page. It is called the tricky edition which is actually named after me because of all my suggestions and bugfixing (read: was really really irritating).

Baiscally a great way to manage content on the internet just got way better. Yay for Mephisto! Yay for plugins!

9:14p.m. Running Mephisto on Leopard

This is just a quick note incase anyone else has trouble installing the Mephisto svn locally on a clean copy of Leopard.

(This assumes you’re running Leopard and have a working install of MySQL. For that please see this wonderful guide. It also assumes you’ve set up Mephisto before.)

• The current Mephisto svn revision, 3037 works on Rails 2.0 PR. So to do this, you’d check out the svn of Mephisto:

  svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk your_directory

• Next you’d freeze Rails 2.0 PR, in terminal, cd to your local Mephisto directory, and run:

  rake rails:freeze:edge TAG=rel_2-0-0_RC1

• Next you need to install the tzinfo gem and Action Web Service, with two terminal commands (while cd’d in your local Mephisto directory), running each separately:

  gem install tzinfo --remote

  And

  svn export http://dev.rubyonrails.org/svn/rails/trunk/actionwebservice/ vendor/rails/actionwebservice

• Ok! Next up you must create a Mephisto database with MySQL and properly configure your database settings in config/database.yml. Then you should be able to successfully run in terminal (in your Mephisto directory):

  rake db:bootstrap

  Or

  rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production

Start your favorite script/server for a lovely working copy of edge Mephisto on Leopard!

Many thanks to svenfuchs_ in #mephisto for the advice on a working Rails version!