CMSSurveyReportMephisto
Review report of Mephisto Blog/CMS
Mephisto is a rather new online publishing tool. It combines features from "classic" CMSs with functionality of a blogging-engine. It uses the "Liquid" templatinglanguage, which is easy to use for site-designers, still the system is pretty powerfull and extensible because it has close ties with the underlieing ruby-scripting language. Mephisto uses the Ruby on Rails webapplication framework (RoR).
Mephisto is distributed under the same license as Ruby on Rails. See http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.php
Person(s) reviewing it: init [ät] nadir.org
Official Information: Mephisto: Website, Wiki, Newsgroup, Author: Rick Olson, some Screenshots
Software version(s): Mephisto is under heavy development at the moment. I work wit version 0.7 which runs on REVISION=5218 of Edge Rails. I think the plan is to release a 1.0 Version of mephisto a short while after Rails hits 1.2 .
Status of the report:
done - Nov 20. 06
Before I start...
I do not suggest to use mephisto as a direct replacement for the existing indymedia-CMSs. While working with it, I discovered a lot of nice concepts that I consider usefull for a future imc-cms. (e.g. the "what-happend-on-the-site"-Timeline when you enter the admin-backend, some of the ajax stuff...)
So what we could do is - use mephisto as a starting point to develop our own indy-cms. That would give us all the benefits of the Ruby-on-Rails-Framework and some good "boost" for the early stage of the development, since we don't have to start form scratch but we would just have to add the parts, that are vital to us.
In my opinion these parts are:
- extend Database scheme
- automated pre-production of pages so they can be mirrored
- Open Publishing
- Media-Handling
- support for multiple languages
What We Have
| Feature | Score (0-5) | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Anonymous open publishing | 2 | None - so far, but there is a sopisticated mechanism for handling anonymous comments |
| easy mirroring capability | 0 | None - so far - Rails caching works after the first request of the page, but the RoR-Framework has a few features that could make pre-production of CMS-Pages very easy. Namely there is a "render-to-string"-method and so called filters that can be used to trigger actions like writing a changed page to a file |
| syndication -out/in | 3 | Out: can produce RSS/Atom-Feeds In: there are plugins |
| search | 3 | a simple site-search is in place |
| The ability to create multiple instances | 3 | different template sets for different sites will be supported in a single instance of the system |
| Multimedia handling | 3 | Very good asset-manager, but no automated automated media-handling with the articles |
| Categories | 4 | nested sub-categories are possible |
| Good performence on affordable hardware | 1 | its Ruby |
| Customisability | 5 | Extensible templatig language and Ruby on Rails make the system very easy to customize |
| internationalisation | 0 | no i18n so far, basic concepts for i18n are in the RoR framework |
| translation | 0 | nope - we would have to add that |
| comments | 4 | has a smart way to handle comments that can be adjusted per article |
| anti-abuse measures | 4 | can use Akismet |
| easy moderation | 4 | I think I has a very usable UI |
| calendar | 0 | |
| features | 3 | yes, it has features ;-) |
| documentation | 2 | wiki, blogs, newsgroup, lotes of friedly active users |
What We Want
| Feature | Score (0-5) | Remarks |
|---|---|---|
| Logins | 4 | Has login-system and audits "who-did-what" and when ppl where last loged in, most collectives will disable this feature for privacy-reasons, im pretty sure about that |
| access control | 0 | |
| user moderation | 0 | |
| open editing | 0 | but all articles are under revision controll so you can go back to older versions, good starting-point... |
| profile | 2 | basic user profile, so far only for backend users |
| user notifications | 0 | none so far or only experimental, but the framework has a mailing-component called ActionMailer. There are also jabber-libs for ruby |
| notify moderator button | 1 | would be a nothing but a special kind of comment to an article... |
| podcasting/vodcasting | 1 | so far only admins can upload assets and link the files in articles |
| redundancy (DB content storage) | 0 | it can use a the DBs that RoR supports, listst here |
| version control | 5 | All the articles are versioned, the author of the CMS (Rick Olson) also wrote the Acts as versioned - Plugin for RoR |
| customisable skins by user | 2 | would be easy to implement... |
| accessability | 2 | ...is a question of good templates not of the CMS-Code |
| xhtml validation | - | see above |
| GIS | 4 | On this page you will find to a couple of GIS-libs for ruby/rails |
| photo galleries | 0 | would have to be added by us |
| licensing options | 0 | would have to be added by us |
| image manipulation | 2 | ruby-lib for image manipulation |
| p2p integration | 0 | |
| social networking / filtering systems | 0 | |
| wysiwyg | 0 | But good support for three different formating languages textile, markdown and Plain HTML |
| tagging: | 5 | all content can be tagged, taglists can be used on the site and per-tag-archive-pages are created |
| anti-bot systems like captchas | 2 | only as a plugin |
| easier installation | 4 | its basicly a RoR site |
| cross site search | 0 |