I spent the last week playing with Mephisto (a Rails blogging engine turned CMS). I thought it would be a good platform for a site that I may be about to work on.
I spent the last week fighting with Mephisto trying to get it to behave the way I want it to work in production on my host.
I think it is a very OK CMS. It does a lot of stuff. On the flip side, it does a lot of stuff. And has a pretty ridiculous layout scheme that uses liquid. Hey, guess what I don’t want to learn? Yet another markup language that generates HTML. I can just do the HTML thank you very much.
The problem is that I have a controller (and model of course) that I cleaved into my blog to show what I am listening to on iTunes. It works great in development mode on my laptop, but not in production mode. I am very frustrated by it, and there is a whole lot of junk in this thing that I don’t know anything about or really care to.
So instead I am going to roll my own. In Merb. That’s right - Merb. I am pretty excited about the idea and hope to be able to spend a lot of time on it next week when I am on vacation from my day job. I’m planning on hosting it on Github, and maybe even having some others find it and collaborate.
I am also working on another Merb project with some guys that I went to the Big Nerd Ranch with. Lots of exciting things happening in my after-hours hacking time.
Stay tuned.