[LRUG] Ruby/Rails based blog system

[Piers Cawley]

"Makoto Inoue" <inouemak at googlemail.com> writes:

> Hi.
>
> I see lots of discussion about this month LRUG topic and beginner's session,
> but this is not related to these topics at all. Hope you do not mind.
>
> I am thinking about setting up my own blog using Ruby/Rails based blog
> system, and would like to ask opinions.

As a Typo maintainer I'm a wee bit biased.

> I did a bit of google research and looks Typo and Mephisto are the two
> popular Rails based blog systems. I installed both Typo and Mephisto, and
> Typo (http://trac.typosphere.org/ ) seems to have more features than
> Mephisto (http://mephistoblog.com/), but Typo seems heavier and more
> complex, and I found a blog about how someone converted from Typo to
> Mephisto  (http://blog.codefront.net/2006/9/1/from-typo-to-mephisto). I like
> Typo's dynamic preview functionality(You can see how your HTML looks like as
> you type), but I also like Mephisto's pretty url functionality.

The dynamic preview really hammers the back end though; more recent
versions allow you to turn that off.

If by 'pretty URLs' you mean Mephisto's lack of /articles in the URL,
then I have to confess that I'm jealous of that one. At some point I
would like to allow for the option of Mephisto style URLs, but we're
going to have to maintain support for the old style because changing
permalinks is bad.

Typo is complex though; I've said that my goal as a maintainer is to
get the code to a point where I'm not embarrassed by it. 

> I've seen some posts about people using Mephisto, so would
> appreciate if I can hear opinions (and also some alternative Rails
> based blog systems you recommend. I tried Radiant and Rubrick CMS,
> but they seem to be too generic for my personal blog use).  I also
> would like to know if typo and Mephisto are matured enough compared
> to other well known blog systems, such as Wordpress and Movable
> type.

I'm not sure Typo is.


-- 
Piers Cawley <pdcawley at bofh.org.uk>
http://www.bofh.org.uk/