sjs

Well for just over a year Typo ran the show. I thought I had worked out most of the kinks with Typo and Dreamhost but the latest problem I ran into was pretty major. I couldn’t post new articles. If the stars aligned perfectly and I sacrificed baby animals and virgins, every now and then I could get it to work. Ok, all I really had to do was refresh several dozen times, waiting 1 minute for it to timeout every time, but it sucked nonetheless.

Recently I had looked at converting Typo to Mephisto and it seemed pretty painless. I installed Mephisto and followed whatever instructions I found via Google and it all just worked, with one caveat. The Typo converter for Mephisto only supports Typo’s schema version 56, while my Typo schema was at version 61. Rather than migrate backwards I brought Mephisto’s Typo converter up to date instead. If you’re interested, download the patch. The patch is relative to vendor/plugins, so patch accordingly.

After running that code snippet to fix my tags, I decided to completely ditch categories in favour of tags. I tagged each new Mephisto article with a tag for each Typo category it had previously belonged to. I fired up RAILS_ENV=production script/console and typed something similar to the following:

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require 'converters/base'
require 'converters/typo'
articles = Typo::Article.find(:all).map {|a| [a, Article.find_by_permalink(a.permalink)] }
articles.each do |ta, ma|
  next if ma.nil?
  ma.tags << Tag.find_or_create(ta.categories.map(&:name))
end

When I say something similar I mean exactly that. I just typed that from memory so it may not work, or even be syntactically correct. If any permalinks changed then you’ll have to manually add new tags corresponding to old Typo categories. The only case where this bit me was when I had edited the title of an article, in which case the new Mephisto permalink matched the new title while the Typo permalink matched the initial title, whatever it was.

I really dig Mephisto so far. It’s snappier than Typo and the admin interface is slick. I followed the herd and went with the scribbish theme. Perhaps I’ll get around to customizing it sometime, but who knows maybe I’ll like a white background for a change.

I’ve been really frustrated with Typo recently. For some reason changing my last post would cause MySQL to timeout and I’d have to kill the rogue ruby process manually before any other changes to the DB would work, instead of hanging for a minute or two then timing out. Luckily I was able to disable the post using the command line client, the bug only manifested itself when issuing an UPDATE with all the fields present. Presumably the body was tripping things up because most other fields are simple booleans, numbers, or very short strings.

Add to that the random HTTP 500 errors which were very noticeable while I was trying to fix that post and I was about to write my own blog or switch to WordPress.

I don’t love WP so I decided to just upgrade Typo instead. I was using Typo 2.6, and the current stable version is 4.1. They skipped version 3 to preclude any confusion that may have ensued between Typo v3 and the CMS Typo3. So it really isn’t a big upgrade and it went perfectly. I checked out a new copy of the repo because I had some difficulty getting svn switch --relocate to work, configured the database settings and issued a rake db:migrate, copied my theme over and it all just worked. Bravo Typo team, that’s how an upgrade should work.

No more random 500 errors, things seem faster (better caching perhaps), and that troublesome post is troublesome no more. I am happy with Typo again.