On 3/26/07, Alexy K. [email protected] wrote:
Not to start any flames, but to compare – also came across Mephisto,
which uses Liquid for templates. Is Mephisto suitable for a newspaper
too, and how does it compare with Radiant?
Content in Radiant is tree-based - all your pages are children of other
pages, with the exception of home page which is root. Therefore, you can
have rich content hierarchy organizing articles in branches, but you
can’t
publish the same page under more than one branch. You can explicitly
assign
templates to each article, or let them inherit the template from their
parent (default behavior). The killer feature (IMO) of Radiant is that
pages
can have multiple custom-named parts. There are also special types of
pages:
archive (adds blog-like dates to URLs), 404 not found, mailer … Some
of
them are distributed via extensions.
In Mephisto, things are more flat. Articles are organized in sections,
and
you can have a single article appear in multiple sections. You assign
layouts to sections. You can have blog-like dates in URLs (based on your
preference); sections can also have custom URLs. The killer features of
Mephisto are overview (who logged in last, when, what changed recently,
new
user comments), asset manager and theme manager. Articles in Mephisto
can
only have two parts: “extended” and main. Authors in Mephisto cannot for
some reason enter their full name to be displayed, just their usernames.
Radius is slightly better documented than Liquid - you can even open up
a
Radius reference straight in the admin interface. Liquid is more
beautiful
for people who don’t like XML-like templating languages. A recent
enhancement to Mephisto enabled designers to code not only in Liquid,
but in
RHTML, Erubis or Haml. Both Liquid and Radius prevent potential
malicious
attempts - designers can’t execute Rails code.
I agree with John that Mephisto is a better blog engine (comments
overview
and approval, Askimet integration, sections, theme manager) while
Radiant is
a better CMS (simpler interface, rich hierarchy, flexibility). Still,
there
are Mephisto sites that don’t look like blogs and Radiant sites that are
blogs.
It all comes down to your specific needs.