Lean, Mean, Blogging Machine

This is the inaugural post to cubanlinks.org via the Mephisto blogging application. I realize that many of you could give a rip what I use to serve-up Cubanlinks. However, for the few of you who might want to hear about my process, here you go:

First, I installed Mephisto directly under my home directory on TextDrive. I did this with the understanding that I planned on using a single instance of Mephisto to serve up several domains (BrianCartenuto.com and blog.DCKSports.com among others). I’m actually incredibly excited about this, given how heavy the overhead of even a single instance of Typo is. I then followed the multiple site configuration steps. Note: I have Revision 2517 of Mephisto installed and only needed to follow the very first step (creating the new Site).

Second, I imported the data from Typo. This process was pretty straightforward. The migrate process can take awhile, with no real output to the screen, so be patient. A few things here: the taggings for my posts were not imported properly. I’ve edited the Wiki page myself to address my solution to this problem. Also, all of the posts/sections that I imported were assigned to Site id=1. I actually meant for my incoming data to be associated with Site id=4, so I just had to update the contents and sections table with a SQL update.

Lastly, I needed to figure out how I was going to handle legacy URL’s for Cubanlinks. I decided to do two things:

• I changed the default Article URL for Mephisto from /:year/:month/:day/:perm to /articles/:year/:month/:day/:perm
• I added the following redirects to my config/environment.rb file

   Mephisto::Routing.redirect \
     'blog/articles/?/?/?/?' => 'articles/$1/$2/$3/$4',
     'blog/articles/?/?' => 'blog/archives/$1/$2',
     'blog/articles/tag/?' => 'tags/$1',
     'blog/articles' => 'blog',
     'blog/xml/rss20/feed.xml' => 'feed/blog/atom.xml',
     'blog/xml/rss' => 'feed/blog/atom.xml',
     'blog/xml/rss20/comments/feed.xml' => 'feed/all_comments.xml'

Mephisto does not support some resources that Typo provides such as:

• Article listings for a single day
• Article listings for a single year
• Feed for article/comments

Well, that’s about all I can think of off the top of my head. Obviously I have alot of work to do, regarding the design of the site, fixing re-routing old resources/links, etc. I really like what I’m seeing with Mephisto, to the point that I’m willing to try and use it as a CMS for my entire site. We’ll see how it goes!