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

The two most popular blogs written in Rails, that I know of, 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.

The other reason for choosing Mephisto this time, is that there was a 7 month gap between the current Typo 4.1 release this month and the 4.0.2 release published in August 2006.

One thing I have learned while using Typo is that if you know Rails, you immediately have an 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 2 or 3 lines of code to add the possibility of having different layouts for different pages in Typo.

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

I’ll continue to use Mephisto for now until I have a more complete view on how things work, but I might switch back to Typo and try their new 4.1 release.