The New Setup: Mephisto

Posted by brian Saturday, October 21, 2006 11:12:00 GMT

If you haven't given Mephisto a try, I'd highly recommend it. It's fast, lightweight, and more intuitive than Typo, at least to me. And getting Softies on Rails converted over from Typo was a breeze. The steps I took were quite similar to those Amy Hoy writes about. There were a couple of moments of weirdness, but overall, quite simple.

  1. Dumped existing Typo database into a text file
  2. Since we switched hosts, recreated the typo database on the new host using the text file from step #1
  3. Created a new database for our Mephisto installation
  4. Installed Mephisto and set up the initial database by running rake db:bootstrap RAILS_ENV=production
  5. Set up the Mephisto database.yml to reflect both the new database and a typo: entry to reflect the existing Typo database
  6. Run the Typo converter - ./script/runner "Mephisto.convert_from :typo" -e production

Just a couple of minor gotchas that I ran into:

  • Existing Typo users didn't show up right away. Made them admin through raw SQL - update users set admin=1 - and it worked. Disallowed login for the default "admin" user.
  • Couldn't upload a theme. Had to manually copy the theme I wanted (see below) to the themes/site-1/other directory, then applied it using the themes interface.

Big props to Delynn Berry for creating the Mephisto version of the Scribbish theme. Honestly, it was the serious lack of a decent theme for Mephisto that kept me from doing this sooner. So thanks, Delynn.

Comments

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  1. Michael Air   October 22, 2006 @ 03:47 AM

    All your links from your feed are using an IP address instead of your domain e.g. http://65.99.223.27/...

  2. Brian Eng   October 22, 2006 @ 02:49 PM

    Thanks. Feedburner was playing catch-up with DNS, so I hacked it in there temporarily. Back to normal now.

  3. DeLynn Berry   October 25, 2006 @ 04:12 PM

    Glad to hear you were able to get Mephisto up and running, and I'm glad you like the theme. Did you happen to see the error that Mephisto generated while trying to upload the theme? I've run into issues with uploads before, and usually the problem was permissions related (on the tmp or themes directories).

  4. Brian Eng   October 25, 2006 @ 05:58 PM

    Not too descriptive, it just said "invalid theme". But it wasn't just Scribbish. It was any theme. So, good chance it may be permissions-related.

  5. Evan   January 17, 2007 @ 09:47 AM

    I ran into the same theme uploading problem just now--if you're using Firefox 2.0 on Windows, when you upload the zipped theme, it sends a mime-type of "application/binary" rather than "application/x-zip" or any of the types that Mephisto expects.

    I ended up having to crack open themesimportcontroller.rb and add "application/binary" to the array of accepted types. Works fine now, though.

  6. music   February 25, 2008 @ 04:57 PM

    Thanks for the nice read, keep up the interesting posts. Good luck.

  7. kino   May 24, 2008 @ 01:12 AM

    The intelligible objects in space and time are by their very nature contradictory.

  8. Ellroy   May 30, 2008 @ 11:18 PM

    As is shown in the writings of Galileo, it remains a mystery why the objects in space and time would be falsified; as I have elsewhere shown, the employment of the empirical objects in space and time (and we can deduce that this is true) can not take account of our ideas.