GraffitiCMS Tip: Formatting blog post excerpts

Tuesday, April 01 2008 - - 0 comments

Many of the themes for GraffitiCMS contain an index.view which will display the first few lines of your post as an excerpt on the front page.   Here are some tips on how you can better control what is displayed in that excerpt, and why you may want to enhance what is displayed.

Using the GraffitiCMS Blog Extensions Plug-In

Monday, March 31 2008 - , - 12 comments

This weekend I had the pleasant surprise to see that Kevin Harder of Telligent, had posted that the new Blog Extensions Plug-In was now published to the GCMS marketplace.  Here are some of my experiences with using the new module on this site, which I hope will make it simple for others to add some great features to GraffitiCMS.

Graffiti CMS is released!

Tuesday, February 19 2008 - - 1 comments

Telligent released the Graffiti CMS platform from beta this morning, and is now at v1.0. Excellent work for the whole team, and for all the people in the community who helped make this a great product to use. This site has already been upgraded to the release code from beta2 bits, and I have to say the upgrade went very smoothly as I had no issues during the process. So if you are looking for a great .NET blogging platform that runs on Windows and Linux (Mono), and that is free for personal use, I would highly recommend it. I also should add the Licensing model to upgrade from Express to commercial...

GraffitiCMS Tip: use www in your site domain name

Wednesday, February 13 2008 - - 0 comments

As of the latest release at this time (Beta 2), new installs of Graffiti CMS default to using just the domain name ( http://jeftek.com ) for your site. All requests to the domain as www.jeftek.com will be redirected to the jeftek.com site via a 301 redirect which is search engine friendly. There was a discussion on the GCMS forums as to whether it was a good/bad to have the www in the domain name which you can read here . But what if you want to use www.jeftek.com because you feel it is the best possible address for your site? It's a simple edit to the web.config file in your site: <!-- Helps...

GraffitiCMS Tip: Use Advanced Editor for posts

Sunday, February 10 2008 - - 1 comments

It turns out that Telligent has 2 editor modes in the post editor: Simple and Default. In an effort to keep things "Simple" they shipped with the editor in Simple mode. You can change the editor to Default Mode by editing 2 places in the correct file. The Advanced editor offers more options such as posting Smileys, Flash, Tables, and other options. I think it was a smart idea to ship with the simple toolbar, as many of these options would be daunting for the "simple" target they are going for. I found this tip on the MKLAB blog which actually found it from the GCMS support forum...

Converting Wordpress themes for Graffiti

Sunday, February 10 2008 - - 0 comments

Since I'm sure many people who are running Wordpress and wanting to migrate to Graffiti will want to take their current theme with them, this is something that will help out. Follow this link to The Web Gambit to view the guide on how to convert your theme. If you are interested in learning about creating new themes for GraffitiCMS please check out Creating a Theme for Graffiti CMS...

GraffitiCMS Tip: Set your Favicon

Sunday, February 10 2008 - - 0 comments

Ever notice the little icon next to the URL in your browser's address bar? That is the site's favicon, which is meant to be an image to represent the site in your Favorites/Bookmarks. Be default, Graffiti uses the red/blue spray can logo, but you can replace it with your own image. There are many sites on the web that will convert your favorite graphic into a proper favicon.ico file, or allow you to create your image by editing pixels to your design. I used this site to create the favicon for my website. This is the favicon.ico for this site: In Graffiti you need to place the favicon.ico file in...

GraffitiCMS Widgets,Plug-ins,Extensions, and Themes

Saturday, February 09 2008 - - 3 comments

Since I am using Graffiti CMS for this site, which supports extending the site via Widgets and Plug-ins, I thought I post what I am finding out in the community. Widgets can be thought of modules which add/modify ways to display content on your site. Think of them like adding a Flickr photo gallery, or a Tag Cloud. Plug-ins can be thought of adding back end functionality to the site. Some of them include things like auto-generating a Sitemap as you add content, or pinging blog publishing services. Extensions are additions that can be enabled through Chalk code to display additional information...

Graffiti Extras project on CodePlex

Tuesday, February 05 2008 - - 0 comments

The more time I spend with Graffiti, the more I am impressed with this product for a CMS platform. Keyvan Nayyeri has started a project on CodePlex where he has already released some really useful plugins. I think what makes me interested about thie platform is the potential in the community to really extend the product. Telligent thought wisely in building in the framework to develop the features users want, and allow them the ability to do it. So in Keyvan's release, he has provided: Google Sitemap plug-in - Auto generates a SiteMap.xml to communicate your website layout to search engines. Mobile...

Checking out Graffiti CMS

Thursday, January 31 2008 - - 0 comments

So I've been using Windows Live Spaces for blogging, but I wanted to check out other blogging platforms. So I'll be checking out a beta of Graffiti CMS and see if it gives me the features I am hoping for. Please excuse the site as I learn how to customize, and work on migrating my old blog entries to this site.