Keyvan Nayyeri

Telligent just announced the second public release of Graffiti which is the Beta 2 version of Graffiti and is available for download here.

After the first release, Telligent tried to improve the product by solving bugs and adding some new features to launch Beta 2 in mid-January. A few days ago Scott sent en email to Beta testers to share them a download link for private Beta and I could download and install Beta 2 on my site and BlogML site quickly.

Thank to simplicity of Graffiti, upgrade process is as simple as installation process and can be done quickly and easily.

There are some new additions and important bug fixes for Beta 2 that I outline from my standpoint:

• Migrator tool: Migrator tool is a built-in utility developed by Jayme Davis that some users have used with Beta 1 on their own risk to import posts from Community Server 2007. Now this tool is a part of Beta 2 and supports WordPress and BlogML imports as well. Good news for me and BlogML team!
• New database providers: VistaDB is now the default database for Graffiti 1.0 Beta 2. This database is licensed by Telligent and doesn't require you to do anything on your server. Just drop the database! I just ordered a Graffiti license to be able to use SQL Server. You can also use Access and MySQL with Graffiti.
• RSS feed issues: Beta 1 had a few issues that were stopping the feed from being validated so I received some feedback from some visitors about their problems with subscribing to my RSS feed on some services like Bloglines.
• MetaBlog API issues: there was a bug with Beta 1 that didn't let you to retrieve recent posts from MetaBlog API. In fact it was sorting posts by date ascending (rather than expected descending order).
• Variables: Variables are a new feature introduced in Beta 2 and Scott has an overview of this feature here.
• DataMover: With Beta 2, Telligent also introduced a Windows application tool named DataMover which helps you to move data from different Graffiti databases to others. For example, I used this tool to move data for BlogML site from SQL Server 2005 to Access and run the site on Access after this.
• New list options: Now you're able to override the default sort behavior for posts in categories and sort them as you desire.
• Improved statistics: there were a few issues with statistics in Beta 1 that are now fixed in Beta 2 and they work better.
• Homepage overrides: In Beta 2 you have the ability to override the homepage and customize it with your content.
• Configuration changes: In Beta 1 you had some separate configuration files in __config folder for your configuration but in Beta 2 configurations are moved back to Web.Config file again.

By the way, Beta 2 is great and more stable than Beta 1. I love the power and simplicity of Graffiti and am happy to see the second public version of this CMS.

But however, I'm experiencing a search problem on multiple Graffiti 1.0 Beta 2 sites that has broken the search functionality. I reported this to Telligent before release but Telligent developers couldn't duplicate the issue. If you're going to install and use Graffiti 1.0 Beta 2, take a look at this feature and let me (and Telligent, of course) know if you have the same problem.

I also would thank Scott Watermasysk and other folks at Telligent for listening. I've been contacting them frequently lately regarding issues and feature requests and they listened and responded all my emails one by one.