Mephisto

As I was so impressed by Beast, I thought I'd take a look at Mephisto too.  Mephisto is a simple CMS that uses either HTML, Textile or Markdown for posts and uses Liquid Templates, a very good idea that shares that unfortunate Rails habit of poor, broken, incomprehensible or non-existent documentation.  Anyway, Mephisto's good.

So let's get a site up on my Windows development box.

Step 1. Get the code

Go to the local folder that you're using for this ('My Documents/Developments/ruby/plus' in my case and checkout Mephisto.  I've gone for version 0.6.1.  Tortoise makes this very easy: just right click on the folder name, select 'SVN Checkout' and enter: http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/tags/rel-0.6.1/. 

Or bring up a command shell (Start -> Run -> cmd.exe), go to the Mephisto folder and type:

svn checkout http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/tags/rel-0.6.1/

Step 2. Get Edge Rails

With that command shell, type: rake freeze_edge

This is needed as Mephisto, like Beast, uses some of the features in the 'edge' version of Rails, i.e. the version that hasn't been formally released yet.  There's a note on the Mephisto Blog that Mephisto will be frozen at Rails 1.2 whenever that is released.

Step 3. Get the timezone code

Type: gem install tzinfo

TZInfo is a Ruby implementation of a well-established Unix-based solution to the problem of time zones and British Summer Time - or Daylight Saving Time as the Americans call it.

Step 4: Set up the database

Grab 'database.example.yml' from the config folder and reformat it for whatever database you're planning to use.  I'm going to use MySQL for this one so I can simply rename 'database.example.yml' to 'database.yml', remembering to set the right username and password for MySQL, and then create a MySQL database called 'mephisto_development'. 

Then: rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=development

Step 5: Now run it

Type: ruby script/server

This will start WEBrick on port 3000 so you can now access Mephisto on http://localhost:3000/.  You can find the admin utility at http://localhost:3000/admin (username 'admin' and password 'test'). It's very straightforward to use and it's well worth having a play on your development machine before starting again from scratch on your production box.  I'll talk soon about how to use it for non-blog sites and also on how to get it live on Textdrive.

PS There are official installation instructions here.

Comments

[Zelnox]

._. Hi.

I've been trying to setup Mephisto 0.6.1 on a Windows PC to try it out, but keep getting stuck at the rake db:bootstrap stage. rake aborts with the error that the a table does not exist. Actually, it fails before creating any tables. I'm using Rails Edge version 5214. I also tried an earlier version, but with the same error. Any ideas? Thanks.

---
** Execute db:bootstrap:load
rake aborted!
Mysql::Error: #42S02Table 'mephisto_development.sections' doesn't exist: DELETE FROM sections

[Old Dog]

Have you tried the Mephisto Group? They should be able to help. Sounds like it could be a permissions problem on your database but I'm not (yet) an expert.
http://groups.google.com/group/MephistoBlog

[Tan]

Real helpful, thanks for the trilogy.

[adam]

late comment, but if anyone wants documentation info on liquid templates you should read u about django templates. syntax is the same and the django project is very well documented