Mephisto

James Crisp wrote a nifty Contact Feedback plugin for Mephisto for the new Thoughtworks Studios site. The plugin looks nice, and fills a common need in Mephisto. Also, the Thoughtworks Studios site is extremely well-done. I had seen it before, but didn’t realize it used Mephisto. Major kudos to James Crisp and Thoughtworks!

For anyone that asks: it looks like the main difference between this, and my own feedback plugin is that mine doesn’t send emails. It stores them in the DB and lets you browse in the admin. Nice since your inbox doesn’t get the spam, but I’ve been finding that I often forget to check it :)

Saimon has posted a mephisto_i18n plugin, as well as the first part of a companion tutorial for globalizing your Mephisto site.

Interesting, Endoborn seamlessly merges Mephisto and Shopify into a slick clothing store. This is a great example of why we need to stay simple. Reject the notions that you need to throw in event calendars or ecommerce stores into Mephisto, and embrace those niche services like Shopify.

Excellent work from the SofaMade folks!

Steve Smith, an accomplished Wordpress hacker, recently tweaked his design and migrated to Mephisto. It’s nice to have another beautiful site in the collective. When Steven first approached Justin and I about making the switch, I worked hard on the backend to make it flexible enough to meet his needs. We finished fleshing out how the archives would work, rewrote the Dispatcher to provide the unique permalinks that Steve uses, and added article tagging. We’re still not done, but orderedlist.com looks fantastic. Great job!

Next on the list is LocusFocus, by Mark Daggett. The site serves as a homepage for the LocusFocus studio, while providing a blog for RAM and his plugins. Another great looking and unique Mephisto site, with some quite interesting photography. Also, check out RAM, Mark’s Ruby Asset Manager. Always nice to see more great OSS rails apps out there.

So, maybe Mephisto has lost that lightweight blog engine feeling. I think it’s evident that we’ve been focusing on writing a kick ass publishing engine and trying to get break away from the standard articles/archives/tags/category blog feel. We’ve worked hard to keep it simple enough to run one of those straightforward blogs if you want, but Mephisto really starts to shine once you start expanding. I’ve also heard rumors of a Mephisto installation hosting several thousand blogs, how cool is that?

Though Justin and I have been taking a bit of a break from Mephisto, we’ll be back in 2007 and we hope to see all you there with us. Happy holidays and all that…

Boy, have I been slacking in my duties…

First, Thomas Fuchs migrated his blog, as well as the Fluxiom Blog and typestorming to the latest Mephisto. Very cool stuff. He even hints at some plugin trickery performed on on typestorming. He’s been one of the earliest supporters for Mephisto, putting (I think) the first company blog on Mephisto before it was even ready for widespread use.

Second, John Long, author of the distinguished competition (Radiant), moved his blog to Mephisto. It’s interesting how two very similar applications came out about the same time. I know I probably would not have bothered with Mephisto had I known of Radiant. But as it worked out, there are two bad ass publishing systems out for Rails with different approaches. They are surely different in philosophy, but they are also fighting the same enemy (and that is a discussion for another time).

Things have quieted down on the Mephisto front, but there are people pushing the boundaries of Mephisto’s crappy incomplete plugin system. Justin has been doing some crazy liquid templating stuff, and simplifying how sections work. There’s also been talk about refining the permalink system a bit, adding support for podcasting, etc. 2007 should be a great year for Mephisto.

Patrick Lenz recently launched his rails consultancy, limited overload on Mephisto. Fantastic design!

I’m a little late on this, but sly released a slick original Mephisto theme: Pinder.

Justin finally moved Encytemedia over to Mephisto. About damn time, I say! He’s using some of the bleeding edge Mephisto features, such as global recent comments, custom permalink URLs, and real archive areas.

Another addition to the Mephisto family is the new site from the “opinionated” Rails host: Engine Yard. That’s one beautiful site by Damien Tanner (design) and Cristi Balan (Mephisto integration).

It’s exciting to see that we’re finally getting to the point where it’s possible to do some really cool stuff with Mephisto. The upcoming Noh-Varr release goes a long way with making this possible. We’re just finishing some things up still, and should have a release out shortly. And immediately after that, it’s onwards towards 1.0!

Mephisto has been a hot topic as of late and we've seen some great things happen over the past couple weeks. Most notably, we've seen some really hot designs and some pretty cool plugins surfacing around the Mephistosphere. The Brits especially seem to be taking a liking to Mephisto.

Danwebb.net

Dan has a great looking Mephisto site which is sporting a host of Mephisto plugins he has created including Mephisto Del.icio.us, Mephisto Last.fm, Mephisto Upcoming, and finally his Unobtrusive Synatx Highlighter. Wow! Thats a lot of stuff and Dan has been kind enough to make it all available for the entire Mephisto community as simple Rails plugins.

Dan also tells us why he chose Mephisto over the host of other systems available, pointing out how easy it is to extend Mephisto among other things. Dan knows his stuff too. For those of you who don't know, Dan is the guy who hosts the @media conference.

UJSForRails and Luke Redpath

Luke (another bloody Brit) has been pumping out some beautiful Mephisto sites. Just as Dan showed us how extensible Mephisto is through plugins, Luke shows us how customizable the templates can be. It's a great example of a cross-breed site that uses both Mephisto's blogging features and it's site features.

Luke's personal site is also powered by Mephisto and is sporting a variation of the UJSForRails design. He has really blinged this one out with the Last.fm plugin!

I'll show you mine if you show me yours

If you've got a cool looking Mephisto site or have created some plugins which others just can't live without, we'd like to see them. Toss us a comment and show us what you've been doing with Mephisto.