Typo
Ok, I’ve been playing around with Typo a bit now and it seems a lot nicer than Wordpress. A lot of the “nicer” comes from it being written with Ruby On Rails, which is a kick-ass platform, especially when compared to the steaming pile of dung that is PHP. Don’t get me wrong, WordPress is very nice – but Typo suits me more.
It helps that I’ve done some stuff with Rails, and I know how the framework is organized and is intended to work. This, together with Ruby being a nice and concise language, makes peeking under the hood in Typo a pleasant experience, as opposed to the “aaaagh, I want to claw my eyes out!” reaction I get from PHP and WordPress. I’m already thinking of writing a sidebar plugin or two, they seem pretty straightforward. I also want to add a text filter to generate DriveThruRPG links easily.
The installation and setup was pretty straighforward, the new installer defaults to a Mongrel server which suits me fine. I ended up with Mongrel listening to a port on the local interface, with Apache proxying requests that way. Rails is not thread-safe, so Mongrel wraps most of the app in a sync block – which is fine for a small site like this, but would not scale for more traffic. Luckily, Mongrel has support for running a cluster of Mongrel instances, and Apache 2.2 and later have a load balancing proxy module that is reported to work. I don’t need that now, but it’s good to know that stuff like that exists. All in all, it seems that the Mongrel + proxy solution is a very painless way to deploy and administed Rails apps. Nice. Production deployments have always been the slightly ugly side of Rails, up to now at least.