Ruby CMS/blog: Mephisto vs. Radiant

Question

I'm looking for a blogging tool with some light CMS features in Ruby on Rails. I mainly want something simple, but configurable. I have no need for page snippets, etc. Just your basic main blog, very good (and easy) theme support, some nice sidebar stuff, a few static pages and MetaWeblog API support.

I'm thinking of either using Mephisto or Radiant CMS (everything else seems half-baked or extremely lightweight at best):

http://mephistoblog.com/

http://www.radiantcms.org/

Documentation for Mephisto seems very lacking and their site is a mess. I've also read some bad things about it's stability. Radiant seems more stable in comparison and has heaps of useful plug-ins. However, it isn't designed for blogging out of the box. That has to be added as almost an after thought. Creating a custom theme also seems more cumbersome with Radiant due to the sub-page/snippet feature.

Which should I choose?

Answer 1

Mpehisto is far easier for a blog. Mephisto is a blog with CMS capabilities. Radiant is a CMS with blog capabilities. If the blog is your main goal, go with mephisto. Settings Radiant is like setting up a whole website. Powerful, but a lot more than you need if you just want a blog.

Answer 2

Try Marley used (among others) by http://restafari.org/ (the author). very, very nice :). Mephisto is kind of messy (its root are very old). Radiant, well, ... I used both of them, never liked any that much.

Answer 3

Mephisto is known for being quite a beast. Maybe you should try out Enki or perhaps go really light-weight and try something in Sinatra (like this or this). Your not going to find MetaWeblog support, but you can contribute that if you have the time...

Answer 4

You could also try Typo (on Github too). It has be mostly rewritten recently, support RoR 2.2 and s quite good.

Answer 5

I don't think that either Mephisto or Radiant are going to be your thing.

I've been using Radiant extensively for the past two years or so and I before that I used Mephisto extensively. I still use Mephisto for several sites but not for much longer. The codebase on those is several years old..

Radiant doesn't have easy theming, nor nice sidebar stuff. Radiant is more like a great toolbox for website builders. You need to do a lot of building yourself and it takes a little bit to figure it out.

Mephisto has fallen pretty far behind the times. I gave up on it a while back and I keep looking to see if there's anything new to give me a reason to back and I haven't seen it yet.

Honestly the advice to look for another option is good. Rails needs a new option for a modern blogging engine. Personally I'm going to look into Typo again. It seems to have new life and may be just the thing.

Answer 6

Visit the below links for detailed comparison and reviews

http://www.railspassion.com/rails/cms/typo-or-mephisto-or-radiant-cms/ http://www.railspassion.com/rails/cms/typo-mephisto-and-radiant-cms/

Answer 7

Hi. Marley is nice. I tried it for a bit but wanted to add more features, and ended up writing something similar called Nesta. I agree that Mephisto is a bit tricky to bend to your will (this is the main reason that I went looking for something else, before I tried Marley and built Nesta).

Nesta has theme support, but the list of available themes is still quite small (we're working on that).

See http://effectif.com/nesta for more info. Feel free to get in touch if you fancy some help/advice (there's also a Nesta mailing list).

Also, I should mention Radiant. I've used it successfully to build simple sites that clients need to be able to update, but for my own stuff I always use Nesta as there are fewer barriers to just getting things done if I edit the HTML/CSS and my site content in a decent editor.

Cheers, Graham

Answer 8

I would highly recommend http://refinerycms.com

It fits quite well what you're asking for. Simple, lightweight and excellent theme support.

The themes are very easy to create because they work exactly like regular Rails views so you don't have to learn too much to create one. More info on themes here: http://github.com/resolve/refinerycms/blob/master/vendor/plugins/themes/readme.md

I am biased though as I am a developer on the project :-)

Answer 9

Definitely pay attention to HTML5 and CSS3 support. Since we are talking Rails find out when they will have Rails 3 support.

I recommend refinerycms.com.

Answer 10

+1 for refinerycms.com. And it has Rails 3 support now.

Answer 11

Has anyone heard when radiant will support Rails 3?