A New World of Content Management

GraffitiCMS is one of the best Content Management Systems (CMS) I found on the ASP.NET platform. According to Telligent, this project has been started to research on new features for Telligent commercial CMS products. Due to some reason they have decided to make it open source on January 2010. I think its a really good decision for both Telligent and Web Community.

GraffitiCMS is a light weight and powerful CMS for publishing content on the web. More than a Blog Engine it provides features like Revision Management (this includes a built-in Diff Tool), Custom Home Pages, Graphical Usage Reports and an Extension API for implementing Plugins. Moreover Graffiti uses a Template Language called Chalk which can be used to access CMS functionality on HTML. This can be used to write dynamic content even on a web post. The other interesting feature I noticed is the way Themes are imported. A theme can be imported to a Graffiti CMS using a single XML file. It contains binary data required to create Images, CSS, Java Script and View files. This is amazing, it's the first time I noticed this feature.

This is how you can move an existing blog to Graffiti;

1. First export all your data from your existing blog to a BlogML file. Most of the leading Blog Engines provide a feature to do this or else you might be able to find external applications or plugins which supports this feature.

2. Secondly download GraffitiCMS source code from Codeplex and build the solution in MS Visual Studio. At the moment there are no releases packaged under Downloads section. Therefore we need to build the entire solution to make the DLL files required and copy them into a new folder called bin inside Graffiti.Web. Required Telligent DLL files can be downloaded from here.

3. Thereafter upload the content under Graffiti.Web folder to your Web Host using a FTP client. May be you can create a new Web Folder called graffiti to make sure that you first test Graffiti before removing your existing one. There might be problems with the features of your Web Host with the requirements of Graffiti.

4. Now we need to create a new database. This can be a MySQL, MS SQL, MS Access or a Vista DB.

5. Set the database connection settings in the Web.config file. Web.config file itself has instructions how to do it. Your Web Host will provide you required details (Host, Database Name, Username and Password) when you create a new database.

6. As the last step we need to set the default password to change_me in the Web.config file.

7. That's it now you can test run the new web site :-)

There were few issues which I encountered during this process;

1. When I first uploaded GraffitiCMS build 39743 to my Medium Trust Web Host it raised an exception saying NVelocity.dll cannot be loaded. I guess this is an issue in this release. Therefore I tested the releases below that one by one and found release 38691 does not have this problem.

2. I have IIS7 installed in my Web Host but Post URL Routing did not work properly (This feature did work when I tested a local copy of Graffiti using MS Visual Studio debugging web server). I could not find the exact reason for this but I found a work around. What we need to do is to enable "Generate Folders for Posts/Categories/Tags (Legacy)" option in Control Panel -> Site Options -> Configuration menu. It will create required folders and Default.aspx file to handle the request. For existing post this process can be run through Control Panel -> Site Options -> Utilities -> Rebuild Pages.