Now Graffiti Powered
Last night I migrated this blog from Community Server 2007.1 to Graffiti. Although it might be hard to tell that at first glance because it is using a very similar theme.
When the first batch of Telligenti jumped from CS to Graffiti a couple months ago, I had thought I would keep my blog on CS for the foreseeable future. Mostly because I've been working on CS for several years so it was hard to imagine not using it, and also for dogfooding new versions. Back when I first created this site back in 2004, it was running a combination of .Text and nGallery. Then I migrated to Community Server 1.0 and upgraded to pretty much every alpha, beta, and stable version of CS since then up to v2007.1.
But about a month ago I switched over to the Graffiti team here at Telligent, and the more I work with it the more I love how simple yet flexible it is. So I decided to migrate my blog after all, and started planning out tasks I wanted to complete beforehand:
- I created a Graffiti version of my Gulf Coasting theme that I had written for CS 2007 last summer. You can download this theme for free from the Graffiti Marketplace that is integrated in the Graffiti control panel, and I'll put it up for download here soon.
- To make Graffiti a top notch blogging platform, I created a Blog Extensions plugin that extends graffiti with a few advanced blogging features that we left out of the core to keep it simple. This plugin adds the ability to automatically send & receive trackbacks and pingbacks, sends blog update pings, adds a comments RSS feed, and support for GeoRSS. It's running on this site right now, and we are planning on releasing this as an official Telligent plugin in the near future.
- To go along with the new ability to receive trackbacks (via plugin), I added support for importing trackbacks from CS to the CS 2007 migrator and some new Chalk collections that on the post page. These changes will be included in the upcoming Graffiti service pack release.
- I wanted to keep a simple photo gallery on my site, and a short while ago Andrew Duthie sent us a sample Graffiti theme where he had added the very slick open source Slide.Show Silverlight photo gallery control. I was really impressed with how polished and configurable that control is, so I created another Graffiti plugin that embeds it and allows you to add a photo gallery to a post page. It supports photos uploaded to your web site or saved in Flickr. This plugin is also running on this site. I'll release it (with source code) when the aforementioned Graffiti service pack is available, as it requires some of the new events that were recently added to core.
- I am using Rich Mercer's Permanent Redirect Graffiti plugin, which redirects requests to posts and tags using the Community Server format to the new Graffiti paths. It is working wonderfully, and combined with a few IIS redirects that I setup for my downloads and a few other urls, should hopefully prevent anyone from getting a 404 error on my site. Unless of course you just type some random url in.=)
- Lastly, I am also using Jayme Davis's SkinnyWeb plugin to compress the output source for faster download times, and one that Scott Watermasysk wrote to display related posts inside the RSS feed.
Now that my site is running on shiny new bits, I feel inspired to start blogging again. Expect lots of new Graffiti related posts and projects coming soon, and I'll try and mix it up with a few Community Server tips every now and then as well.
