Keyvan Nayyeri

In the latest days of December 2008 Telligent released a new version of its Graffiti CMS software, version 1.2, after a long while of silence around the project. The new version had some minor changes in comparison with its preceding version, but it was worth having it at that point.

You may also know that I have started an open source project around Graffiti called Graffiti Extras which provides a collection of plug-ins, extensions, widgets, and themes for this CMS licensed under a New BSD license. This project has had some major and minor releases to now, and with the help of a few team members I could add new features to it during the time.

When I referenced the official announcement of Graffiti 1.2, I promised to have a new release of Graffiti Extras very soon. Besides, better open source contributions was one of my main goals for 2009, so here comes my first open source work in the new year!

The new version of the project, Graffiti Extras 1.3, has four main changes in comparison with version 1.2.

The first change is a set of code changes behind the scenes. I polished the code and you don’t notice, but these changes have made the code simpler and more readable. During the time I better understood the structure of Graffiti APIs, and made some tweaks to have a better code.

The second change is the fix for an issue with my Post Navigator Extension when using VistaDB. A few weeks ago Steve caught the problem, and followed up with it, and I checked in the fix, but couldn’t update the download packages at that time.

The addition of my newest Graffiti plug-in to disable email notifications for spam feedback is the third change in the project. Now you can use this plug-in as a part of the project in order to stop your application from sending email notifications for feedback items that are marked as spam.

The last change in the project was a feature request by a user who had asked to automatically update Robots.txt file on the server with the address of sitemap file to enable the auto-discovery for search engines. This new feature is also added to version 1.3 and you can use it.

By the way, I’m glad that Graffiti Extras has been an active open source project with smooth enhancements and new features that users could find helpful. I’m looking to adding new features and make it even better as Telligent releases the upcoming versions of its CMS product. I also hope that they leave the 1.x versioning, so I can keep the consistency with their version numbers after this. Now I’m 0.1 bigger than them!

You can download Graffiti Extras 1.3 as a Graffiti Package (the simplest deployment option), binary package, or source code package from the CodePlex workspace.