Keyvan Nayyeri

Graffiti is supposed to be a general CMS that enables easy and powerful content publishing and management for users.

Besides this general goal (which is already achieved and proved by some excellent showcases of this CMS) it can be also a great choice as a blogging engine and there are also many users who use it as a blogging tool (like myself).

The blogging face of Graffiti was attractive enough to get some old Community Server folks to switch to this CMS for their own blogs.

As I stated before and repeat it here again, the general goal of Graffiti is heavily relied on simplicity. Instead, Graffiti has an excellent extensibility mechanism that lets you port new features to it easily.

For those who use Graffiti as a blogging engine, there have been some missing features from the common blogging engines like the support for trackbacks and pingbacks or RSS for comments. Support for trackbacks was planned for Graffiti 1.0 RTW but didn't come with that version, though.

A short while ago Telligent added a Blogging Extension package to Graffiti Marketplace but it was only available from Graffiti control panel and not the public page. That time, they didn't talk about it but Jef Kazimer wrote a descriptive post about features introduced in this package. I also tried and installed this package on my blog since then.

But yesterday Telligent made this public to let everyone knows such a package exists. Blogging Extension is an open source project by Scott and Kevin (or maybe other Telligenti's) hosted on Google code and available for free. This package adds four common blogging features to your Graffiti site:

• Trackbacks
• Comments RSS feed
• Geo RSS
• Pings

Very sweet and simple and of course, a good showcase of Graffiti extensibility options and a good example for those who want to learn about Graffiti development.

This project is the second big open source project around Graffiti that I know. The first one was Graffiti Extras which has support for pings as well. The good point is, both our projects are licensed under a New BSD license that lets you use them easily for different purposes.

It's good to see the progress behind Graffiti and the new community around it. As always, Telligent is doing a great job for this product!