Convalesco

Mephisto is a blogging engine based on “ruby on rails”. Supports a few things and lacks a dose of thousands of plugins and features compared to Wordpress, not to mention that there is “ease of use” as long as you are HTML-savvy. I chose Mephisto because of user comments and because ROR is generally a better choice than PHP. But these two blogging systems are in no way comparable. The fact is that mephisto’s user database is so small that wordpress developers have not add “import” support for Mephisto. It makes sense to me.

I’m using Dreamhost for hosting my websites so, what I needed to do, was move my database from a Mephisto-style to something that Wordpress can read. The solution came from a script and some MySQL extra tweaks. The first trouble was getting the correct encoding, you see I’m Greek and many posts are written in Greek. The default encoding on dreamhost shell is UTF-8 so I assumed that the default encoding on the mysql database *is* UTF-8. Not to mention that when you first login to “PhpMyAdmin” interface you can clearly see the the UTF-8 encoding as the default choice. Anyway, the entire database was in encoding “latin1″. It took me some time, a few forum posts with no answer and a dozen of hours to get over it.

What I did is export the database using mysql dump, install it on a UTF-8 aware mysql database, at my home server, then using the python script to extract that data in a WXR format that wordpress can read, then import the WXR file to wordpress with the build in function.

So here is how I did. First, after Googling *alot* I crossed Jason’s blog. Grab the script and apply the patch you’ll find there, then run it, on a UTF-8 database. If your database is not UTF-8 then do the following:

$ mysqldump --default-character-set=latin1 -u root -p mephisto > test.sql

$ sed 's/latin1/utf8/g' test.sql > ready.sql
$ mysqladmin create mephisto_utf8 -u root -p
$ cat ready.sql | mysql --default-character-set=utf8 -u root -p mephisto_utf8

If you didn’t understand what we’ve did here is:

Now it’s time to run the python script. After downloading the file and the patch for MySQL from Jason’s blog, just type:

$ python m2wp-ready.py  -d mephisto_utf8 -u user -p <pass> -o ready.wxr

Now you should be all the set

Finally the transaction to wordpress went fine. I can see a few wrong dates and the tags/categories are kinda messed up. I’ll fix them the next days. For now I’m happy that I have all my posts, from all my previous blogs since 2006, in one wordpress blog.

I will be more detailed on why I moved to wordpress from mephisto and how I did it. There are some interesting points, a script and a few mysql tricks in order to bypass lame encoding issues.

As for now, I’m happy that I managed to do something that at first glance appeared a bit too complicated

Today I spend some time finishing my new web site. I think that I will work on this template called Integral. You can find info about the template at the end of the page (check out the parting words). Anyway, I messed up a bit with the CSS. I’m reading a few manuals about HTML and CSS. Apparently they will turn really helpful. A good easy-to-use editor is missing from Mephisto. I say so, because compared to other similar projects, it has a very intuitive user interface but when comes to posting you find your self lost through HTML tags which is not handy for everyone. I’d wanted for my best friends to blog with me, but that will not be possible because both of them don’t share the passion and time that I do for computers and Internet. Why should they bother learning HTML? The good news is that you can use a desktop tool and post through XML-RPC. Textmate works great, I’m posting through TM right now and seems to work fine.
As for Mephisto compared to Wordpress. No. I use Mephisto for two days while I’ve used Wordpress for almost 2 years. Wordpress has a huge community around it. The main reason for me choosing Mephisto are the good comments I’ve read about it online and the fact that runs in Ruby on Rails. I have a sympathy for Ruby. Apart from that, the Themes that are ported for Mephisto are not fully compatible with it yet. I mean, you need to edit the Templates manually in order to make them work as you would like them. For instance, I don’t have an option to add links on the left of the screen. I’ll do it manually, but it’s not handy. I’m not referring to advanced users, whatever that means, and it will take a few weeks (probably) until I finish my templates setup. I’d like to install a photo web gallery and use the same template if possible. We’ll see about that in the future.