My current host is Site5. I have gems set up in my home directory, and I have rails 1.2.2 installed as a gem. I tried using it, but just ended up freezing edge rails because I ran into some trouble. I created a db, subdomain, and .htaccess entry for the site. Then, I actually checked it out:

svn co http://svn.techno-weenie.net/projects/mephisto/trunk mephisto

Then, I created config/database.yml. Here’s a template you can use:

development:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mephisto
  username: meph
  password: <new-pw>
  host: localhost

production:
  adapter: mysql
  database: mephisto
  username: meph
  password: <new-pw>
  host: localhost

typo:
  adapter: mysql
  database: typo
  username: typo
  password: <typo-pass>
  host: localhost

Next, I installed tzinfo as a gem to my home directory, and froze it in the project root:

gem install tzinfo
cd mephisto
rake gems:freeze GEM=tzinfo

Finally, it’s time to fill the database with stuff:

rake db:bootstrap

Now that that’s done, for CGI and FastCGI to work, we need a .htaccess file in public:

AddHandler fastcgi-script .fcgi
AddHandler cgi-script .cgi
Options +FollowSymLinks +ExecCGI

RewriteEngine On

RewriteRule ^$ index.html [QSA]
RewriteRule ^([^.]+)$ $1.html [QSA]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ dispatch.cgi [QSA,L]

ErrorDocument 500 "<h2>Application error</h2>Rails application failed to start properly"

Notice I left it as dispatch.cgi. It’s up to you, but while I was still converting I left it like this since it didn’t want to run with FastCGI.

Let’s make sure log and public can be read and, if need be, written to:

chmod -R 755 public log

And finally, the moment we’ve all be waiting for:

script/runner "Mephisto.convert_from :typo" -e production

This connects to the Typo database and runs a converter script in Mephisto’s vendor/plugins/ directory. It takes all the attributes Typo articles and users and comments had and converts them to Mephisto form. Rockin’.

Old Typo Woes

I did this with Typo trunk v1246 with migration level 55. If you are at a similar Typo state, then you may definitely want to continue reading as the next steps I took will be necessary for you as well.

First of all, I saw that my Markdown with SmartyPants formatting was not being interpreted at all! This was, of course, easy to fix because Mephisto is awesome:

./script/console
# Don't do this unless you ALWAYS used Markdown with SmartyPants
# Refer to vendor/plugins/filtered_column if you use Textile or straight up Markdown
# It's just a different a.filter= line below.
Article.find(:all).each {|a|a.filter='smartypants_filter';a.save};1

What this does is find all the Mephisto articles and set their filter to Markdown with SmartyPants. The 1 on the end just prevents it from spewing every article to the console.

Now here’s where I ran into some trouble. Typo has changed its Tag storage technique at least twice, and the way my tags happened to be stored is as follows:

articles
 - id
articles_tags
 - article_id
 - tag_id
tags
 - id
 - name

Someone else had posted a small loop to cure another type of Typo tagging scheme, where there was just one tag grouping string per article. I ran that. Don’t do that.

I noticed that each one of my articles only had one tag, which made me a sad monkey. To remedy this, I wrote a small loop to find all the tags of a Typo article and set them up for the same article in Mephisto. Now, since the id’s on articles and tags are not kept constant in the conversion scripts, this was a bit tricky. Luckily, I never have duplicate permalinks (I guess that means I’m creative…).

First, you have to enable the Typo converter in the console. I did this by adding these 2 lines to the bottom of vendor/plugins/mephisto_converters/init.rb:

require "converters/base"
require "converters/typo"

Then, it’s simply a case of the following:

./script/console
# Remove All Mephisto Taggings as to not make dupes
Tagging.find(:all).each{|t|t.destroy}
# Loop through every Typo article
#    Find the associated Mephisto article
#    Loop through all the Typo Tags
#      Append each tag to the Mephisto tag array
Typo::Article.find(:all).each do |ta|
  a = Article.find_by_permalink(ta.permalink)
  ta.tags(true).collect{|b|b.name}.each do |tag|
    a.tags(true) << Tag.find_by_name(tag)
  end
end

Don’t forget to remove the requires you put into init.rb above. Once you do that, you should have a nicely running Typo -> Mephisto conversion. Congratulations!