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Depending on bloggers’ needs and skills, the choice of a weblog-engine is usually the choice between flexibility, simplicity and functionality. In fact, most popular engines out there don’t manage to find the right mix between all of them and consequently offer perfect solutions for special groups of users. But although these perfect solution work, they don’t necessarily provide what you expect them to provide.

For instance:

• Expression Engine is the first-class engine for professionals; if you’d like to achieve the highest level of flexibility and have the full control over the outer appearance and structure of your weblogs, EE is the first option you should probably consider.
• Movable Type offers a simple and user-friendly user interface with enhanced WYSIWIG-Editor for quick and effective web-publishing.
• Serendipity includes not only “usual” weblog functions, but also a powerful template-engine one can use to create flexible, robust and reusable templates.
• Textpattern is a compact and powerful tool for generating semantically correct pages with an intuitive Markup-language (Textile). Tables and lists can be created on the fly without the knowledge of HTML. Different sections of a Textpattern-based weblog can have different layouts, structure and presentation.
• Drupal is well-known for its clever „taxonomy system“ which allows web-publishers to let the engine classify the content automatically (scaleable content architecture). However, the system is quite complex; it isn’t easy to gain the full understading of how it works.
• Finally, Wordpress is a simple and most popular solution for web-publishers. It lacks the flexibility of Expression Engine and the outstanding interface of Movable Type, but is expandable as no other engine – there are literally thousands of plug-ins for Wordpress. Besides, Wordpress uses Texturize-Engine to convert the content into semantically correct (X)HTML automatically. The system also takes care of the typography used in the article.

But are there any universal solutions? What alternatives do we have on the horizon?

Mephisto CMS: An Overview

One of the very promising newcomers is Mephisto, a free Ruby-based weblog-engine which combines the quality, functionality and user-friendliness of other systems in a simple, elegant and powerful user interface.

Mephisto offers a classic “equipment” which bloggers would probably expect form a professional weblog-engine. Posts can be stored and presented in different sections and on different pages. You can set the time and date you’d like Mephisto to publish a given article automatically. The system doesn’t provide a WYSIWIG-editor, however it supports Textile, Markdown and Markdown with Smartypant. You can use the embedded preview function to make sure your article looks just the way you’d like it to be presented. The number of posts shown on one page can be defined for every single section.

The main advantage of Mephisto lies in the simplicity and user-friendliness of collaborative publishing. Not only multiple authors can use the engine, they can also edit the same document at the same time.

The revision history keeps track on different versions of the document, so the data can always be restored, completed and compared with its previous versions. The diffs between conflicted versions are highlighted visually. All activities of users and co-bloggers appear in a brief overview on the admin’s start page, so you can make sure you know who you’re currently working with. You can also grab an RSS-feed to keep updated about the last changes on the page.

Mephisto has an integrated „aggressive“ caching which is supposed to help you to keep the server load at minimum. It also offers 8 Liquid templates (Liquid is a template language that uses simple tags to decorate your pages with dynamic content from the database) you can use as a robust starting point for your (X)HTML-layouts.

The latter use self-explanatory Mephisto Tags. Every category can have its own template. New JavaScripts, CSS-files and images can be uploaded „on the fly“. There are also 34 Mephisto Themes you can use for CSS-based designs.

Mephisto can also be used as an enhanced Content Management System: plug-ins and themes can serve as templates for complex multicolumn layouts.

You can export Typo-, Wordpress-, Textpattern -and MovableType-based weblogs into Mephisto engine automatically. The project is currently in development; the documentation is permanently completed and expanded. Detailed tutorials and how-tos are supposed to make it easier for everybody to get started with Mephisto. The last version of the engine can be downloaded from the Mephisto Blog for free (1.5 Mb) and requires the server-side support of Rails v1.2.

Summary

• Mephisto offers an elegant and flexible solution you can use to publish the content effectively.
• You can set the time and date you’d like Mephisto to publish a given article automatically.
• Its simplicity and functionality makes Mephisto to a profound tool for both complex weblogs and corporate sites.
• Collaborate features enable you to edit the same article together with your co-workers – at the same time: no data loss is possible.
• Plugins, templates and designs expand the engine with further functionalities and site structures.

Resources

• Mephisto Weblog Engine
• Mephisto Screenshots on Flickr
• Installing Mephisto
• Mephisto: Documentation
• Mephisto: Step-By-Step-Tutorial
• 8 Liquid templates for (X)HTML-Markup
• Mephisto: Using Liquid Templates
• 34 Mephisto Themes;
• Mephisto Support: Google Group