I found all of this rather confusing, since I’m pretty sure I downloaded the same version of Mephisto to my local machine as well as to my Dreamhost account. But I got things running on my local machine with no problem, but had to struggle for a couple of days to get it to work on Dreamhost (with Ruby 1.8.5 and Rails 1.2.3 as of this writing.)

Now Mephisto 0.7.3 works fine out of the box on Dreamhost, something which I myself have confirmed, but unfortunately it’s missing a few choice features found in trunk (specifically next_article and previous_article methods which are available to Liquid) but the average user may not need these things. (As of this writing, I still haven’t implemented chronologic navigation, something which I’ve been extremely fond of because it makes it unobtrusive to read my blog from beginning to end. Narcissistic much?) So follow these instructions and you should be good to go in no time.

Now if you’re a tad more adventurous, you can try the following instructions on installing trunk (which as of this writing is in revision 2936. As to whether newer revisions will work is anybody’s guess.)

Use svn to download the code:

svn checkout http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk [destination directory]

Out of the box, the code seems to choke on a call to a Liquid method. This was seemingly fixed by updating the Liquid plugin:

./script/plugin install http://liquid-markup.googlecode.com/svn/trunk

(Note: script/plugin is relative to the directory you installed Mephisto into.) Liquid (trunk) is currently at revision 6. I’m not really sure if this might break something else entirely, but so far, so good.

After this, you can follow the same instructions for installing mephisto-stable.

Various little things I learned which may be of dubious benefit to others: 6d407a277e81c13e46c7419ca24e0369

Coming up: how I converted Wordpress categories to Mephisto tags.