I used to run a Joomla blog on schmidp.com and, I like being able to hack the software on which I’m running my blog. But because Joomla is written in PHP and I prefer Rails, it was time to look for a new blog software.

As far as I know, the two most popular blog softwares written in Rails are Typo and Mephisto. I have successfully used Typo for our Plymouth Banjul Rally 2007 blog, but I wanted to give Mephisto a try for schmidp.com.

My other reason for choosing Mephisto this time is that there was a seven-month gap between the current Typo 4.1 release this month and the 4.0.2 release published in August 2006.

One thing I’ve learned while using Typo is that if you know Rails, you have a pretty good idea about how other Rails projects are structured and you find your way through someone else’s code quite quickly. If I remember right, it took me about an hour and two or three lines of code to add the possibility of having different layouts for different pages in Typo.

My first impression of Mephisto is that it’s a little low on features and the Section/Page/Blog concept is a bit complicated. I haven’t looked at the code yet.

I’ll continue to use Mephisto until I have a more complete view of how it works, but at some point I might switch back to Typo and try the new 4.1 release.