We (well Rick mostly) have been pretty busy getting Mephisto ready for 0.6. Our goal with 0.6 was to get basic asset management in and we've done that for the most part. There is much more to come in this area though.
Rick and I have talked about ways to integrate, rather, let you integrate, custom services such as Flickr, You Tube, etc, into the asset management area. These third party services wouldn't be going into the core, but we'd like to give you the opportunity to pimp your Mephisto with whatever bling you deem necessary if you so choose. I'll talk about this more later, but here is an overview of what we've managed to get done in preparation for the 0.6 release, probably due out early next week or so.
Asset Management
I've talked in detail about assets already. In addition to what's already been said, we've added tagging support. I've still got some house cleaning to do in this area, but it'll be complete before 0.6.
Article Tagging, Filtering, and Improvements
Articles got some basic tag love. You can now filter articles by section, tags, title, or body. We've also made some minor improvements to the paging links, printing out the page numbers instead of just 'Next Page' and 'Previous page'. You can also jump to an article on your site from the admin now.
Template Liberation
We didn't have this planned until 0.7, but Rick beefed up on milk and cookies and managed to get the templates completely moved to the file system instead of the half and half mix we have in 0.5. This is great because it means that you no longer have to upload every image file you use in your design/css. I'm probably gonna rework the UI here in the future because the sidebar has real potential to run away from you fairly quickly depending on how many assets you have.
Small fixes and improvements
In addition to some of the major upgrades I've listed, we've also fixed numerous bugs and made tiny improvements here and there.
- Liquid gets {{ ifchanged }}, {{article.excerpt}}, {{ unless }}, and {{ format_date: 'mdy' }} for month, day, and year.
- Filters have been improved
- Awesomeness increased by at least 30%.
Stay tuned for 0.6!
This is really cool, but I think you need some AJAX, if you're concerned about bloat you can use jquery (only 15kb). I used it in a modified version of the Simplelog engine for my search. It isn't live search (which i detest by the way). You simply enter your search term and press enter, it is then displayed as a slideDown effect or what not. So try using jquery. Since you're clearly concerned about size. It can do a lot of stuff even basic effects at only 15kb.
Hehe, you made me chuckle. "We need some Ajax". Where? Why? What's the benefit over the current implementation?
I'm not particularly worried about the size of a Javascript file, I'm more worried about the "perceived best" than the actual best. See: http://encytemedia.com/blog/articles/2006/08/12/ajax-killing-usability-one-request-at-a-time
If you want a feature in Mephisto, you can't just tell us that you want it. You need to tell us why. Why is it needed? Does it fall under the core concept of blogging and/or supporting the blogging/content-publishing task? Will it be beneficial to the majority of our normal users?
I addressed this very same question in a previous post. Taking what used to be a live search, making it un-live, and then making me press enter. I don't see the point? You removed the 'live' part? You've basically got a normal search except the page doesn't reload, instead you have to wait on results while watching a pretty spinner graphic. I hope I'm not the only one who sees no benefit in this.
Will we get our excerpt in our RSS feeds?
I'd say having the entire post in the full content feed is important.
I know I want it, most other users will too. And my readers would very much benefit from it
:)
I personally don't like live searches and don't care to use it on my own site. But most importantly, I don't want to require any custom JS on the public side of the site.
Something like this might be useful as a plugin. However, the actual controller code might be small enough for a tiny, unit tested patch.
Get your excerpt? Is it not sending the full text? Or do you want it to send only the excerpt? I'm confused.
My goal is to have full text in all the ATOM feeds (no RSS support planned). If it doesn't do that, it's an oversight that will be fixed.
This is a tricky issue though. I can see instances where folks might want just an excerpt for whatever reason. Do I have site-wide settings? Per-article toggles? Yuck.
I think that this has been fixed in the trunk, but originally you'd have to separate the top part of your article into the excerpt because {{ article | body }} would display both the summary and the excerpt togther. The downside was that the RSS feed would only publish the article body, missing out the except, meaning the RSS content would be missing the top part of the article. I patched the rxml template to display both the excerpt and body together, but I imagine I don't need this anymore.
Regarding what to publish in the RSS feed as an option: perhaps a simple per-article setting would suffice. Three options, as radio buttons: "Feed Display: Excerpt [ ] Body [ ] Both [ ]"
Ugh. I'd rather have full content... but does full content mean excerpt + body, or just body? It all depends on how you write. I think the article edit page is way past 'crowded' right now, so I'd rather not add another setting. Damn these flexible software solutions :)
I just pulled down rev 1878 and not only is the atom feed showing just the post, and not the excerpt, but the site is showing the excerpt AND the post from the home page.
Maybe i'm using excerpt in a way it wasn't intended. From the home page, I want just the first few paragraphs, the intro portion, of my post to show. and when visiting the post page, have both show. So I of course want both the excerpt AND the post in the atom feed.
Rick, because, in 0.5, the post page shows a combination of excerpt + post, I enter the first portion of my 'article' in the excerpt, and the rest in the 'main content'. Maybe we should just call them textarea1 and textarea2, heh.
I dont want anything repeated on the full post page, so I've entered my content this way.
Look at my site to see how i'm working it...
Okay, body used to add the excerpt in 'single' mode, which meant you were viewing a single entry. This confused folks, so I made them into separate vars. If you want the excerpt and the body to show up on the home page you want:
{{ article.excerpt }} {{ article.body }}As for feeds: I may have to add that radio option as Luke suggested. Though, I'll make it a global site option, similar to the comment options (configure a site-wide default and per-article customizations as necessary). I'm going to put them both in the feed though for now.
I'd like to use Mephisto as the front end to a website, but we have a ton of custom backend features and user features (data entry forms, etc). What's the best way to integrate Mephisto?
Hi Justin, I actually think you're in danger of going too far in the opposite direction. Just as you complain about the problem of programmers using too much AJAX, maybe not using enough is also a problem. It may be worth noting that I've been to your blog and it has live search, live preview and even the comments are added with AJAx.
The problem I have with live search is that it's inefficient. Why do a search for "a" when I'm trying to type "apple". Not very efficient to my mind. I think the solution I've suggested is simpler but it's only a suggestion. From a programmers perspective one could argue that reloading an entire page just to display some search results or to add a comment is wasteful. Not every site looks as bare as google.com (for which page reloads do not really matter).
If I really want AJAX search I can add it to my copy of mephisto. I just don't think we should condemn AJAX because a lot of people are using it. The middle way is better than the counterculture.
Mephisto uses plenty of ajax. Like Rails, Mephisto favors action over talk. Let's see some patches and plugins!
Smithy: You tell us. We haven't actually tried what you're talking about. There is a pending patch to modify the admin tabs. We're really not focusing on this stuff until the core of Mephisto is complete. And rather than just coming up with some pie in the sky plugin system, I'd rather have one evolve from actual usage. There are several folks looking at integration on the Mephisto list...
Igwe: Your line of reasoning is wrong. It's not a matter of too much Ajax vs. not enough. It's a matter of what's best. If Ajax is best suited to solve a problem, I would use it without regard to feeling like there is 'too much'. I'm all in favor of using Ajax when it adds real benefit, but until then, I'll continue to make judgement calls based on well founded design decisions.
As far as my blog using all the stuff which I'm against, It uses Typo, and unlike Burger King, I can't have it my way. I was a proponent of all this, and I still think live search has it's benefits, but we all mature to make good design decisions based on context, not on popularity. Mephisto is full of opinions, you either have to accept them or roll a plugin based on what you think is best for your situation. At the moments, standard comments and search is where Mephisto will likely be staying.
If you want live search and live comments in Mephisto, I assume it would be possible for you to write a plugin. If not possible now, we'll get around to allowing people to customize Mephisto for their own opinions, until then your stuck with ours.