Monkeytreats

Ugh. I just got Typo set up and working great, was starting to get some real writing done and…I found out that none of the cool kids are using Typo anymore, that’s so September 2006. Now all the cool kids are using Mephisto.

So my first reaction, of course, is, well, fuck those cool kids, this works fine for me. But then I start reading about Typo being a memory hog, and thinking about how the main Typo site has been down for months, and reading about how a lot of the userbase has moved to Mephisto, leaving less resources for Typo…

Fine, so I’ll evaluate Mephisto, although I’m starting to feel like I’m chasing the flavor of the month. I download it, run it, the database creation script doesn’t work. I dig around in the wiki and on Google for ten minutes before I figure out that I need to freeze Edge Rails. Rails frozen, I finally get it running. Doesn’t look very interesting.

I run the Typo-to-Mephisto conversion script. It chokes on my old imported Typo-via-WordPress-via-Blogger comments, because there’s no IP stored for those commenters. Fine, whatever. I go into MySQL and set the IP on every comment or blog post to “127.0.0.1”. Migration works, only I have a user record in the database that doesn’t show up in the user editing interface, so I have to go into the database again and wipe that record.

So…ok! It’s working! Only now some of the posts that I did in Typo, using Markdown as a text filter, are now being interpreted by Textile. So I have to go in. To each of those posts. And change the filter. And save the post.

So now it’s working. But the default theme is pretty sparse. So I go get Scribbish to get me through in the short-term, and to use as a basis for my own Monkeytreats theme later on. There’s an awesome looking theme manager interface, with AJAXed-up theme uploads, so I go upload Scribbish.

Which fails.

So I go to get another theme, to see if it’s just this particular one. Most of the themes listed on the Mephisto wiki either:

1. no longer exist
2. can only be pulled from svn

and I just want to grab something and install it. So that sucks. I finally find one with a readily-available zip file…but it’s not really a zip, it’s a gzip. Mephisto apparently likes for its themes to be zipped. So that doesn’t work.

So I go convert the gzip into a zip. And I upload it. And it still doesn’t work.

I go dig around on the wiki and the Mephisto Google group and just generally on Google, and eventually I find that the error message I’m getting (“Invalid theme uploaded.”) really means that the mime-type your browser is sending for the uploaded file is not what Mephisto is expecting to see.

Firefox 2.0 on Windows, which is what I’m running, feels like calling the zip file an application/binary, which doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but whatever. On the one hand, it’s really stupid browser behavior, but on the other hand, why hasn’t this app been tested with Windows Firefox?

Griping to myself, I go edit the theme import controller and fix the bug. As annoying as it is to have to fix it, it’s admittedly cool that I could figure out what the problem was and fix it this fast, in a language and a codebase that I have almost no familiarity with.

So now everything is pretty much working. Great, now I can finally go work on my custom theme.

But when I get to the template editing page, there are a bunch of files there that I can edit. Which one do I edit? Hard to say.

Ah, and apparently these are Liquid templates…which means I need to go read about some new domain-specific language that 1% of the programmers in the world use. I’m sure it’s great, and they picked it for really good reasons…but…I’m tired. I just want to slap my XHTML in a page and see something work.

Maybe I’ll have more energy to continue down this path tomorrow, I don’t know. Right now, though, as nice as Mephisto’s admin UI is, I’m just so irritated from beating my head against it that I’m thinking about abandoning it.

In fairness, this is the fifth blogging package I’ve looked at this week, and if Jesus Himself came down from on high and said “Hey dude, try out this new Rails CMS I built, it’s called Bibbly and it cleanses you of your sins,” I’d probably get pissy with him about his install and migration scripts. “How is it that You can turn a loaf into a fish, but you can’t design a God-damn straightforward templating system?”

Sorry, Jesus. No, man, your code is really really clean, I just had been configuring software and drinking whiskey all day. Yeah, we both said some things that I think we both regret. No, we’re cool. You still coming over to play Street Fighter? Sweet, I’ll start making the nachos.