Keyvan Nayyeri

As I wrote yesterday, Telligent has released Graffiti Beta 2 with lots of bug fixes and new features.

One of things about Graffiti is its goal to make things simple and clean and regarding this goal, Telligent has built it in a very simple way (with a very powerful fundamental in back-end). The simplicity of Graffiti has been equal to not including some funny features that could make it more complex so Telligent hasn't added lots of common features to Graffiti.

Instead of doing this, Telligent has built Graffiti on top of a great extensibility framework that is so easy to develop and use. Thank to plug-ins, widgets and Chalk extensions, you're able to extend Graffiti easily. The nice point is you can install and use these extensions just by dropping DLL files to your server and configuring them in control panel in a very simple web user interface. If you compare the installation process with ASP.NET HTTP Modules or CSModules in Community Server, then you can believe the power of Graffiti!

However, it seems that Telligent doesn't want to make things complex by adding some features to the product and would prefer to leave them to users and developers to develop their own extensions.

In the past 1-2 months of public Graffiti existence I've been developing some plug-ins and extensions for Graffiti that I thought they may be helpful for users both as case studies for development process and also as useful extensions that are common among users of similar products. Probably you've read my older blog posts that detail these extensions.

Wrapping up on my works and regarding the fact that Graffiti targets small-business and single user sites who shouldn't be technical .NET developers, I decided to start an open source project for Graffiti called Graffiti Extras on CodePlex.

Graffiti Extras wants to be a single open source resource for Graffiti plug-ins, widgets, extensions, themes, utilities and tools. Graffiti Extras wants to make it possible for users to drop a single DLL file on their server and start using various extra features for Graffiti that may be a desired feature for them.

To get started I created the project on CodePlex and worked smoothly on it to add all my Graffiti works and modified them to be more customizable then developed a couple of more extensions for it to include them in first Beta release of the project which is compatible with Graffiti Beta 2.

So Graffiti Extras 1.0 Beta includes following extras:

• Google Sitemap plug-in: This is an updated version of my Google Sitemap plug-in that now lets you to choose your own file path and name for sitemap file.
• Mobile Theme Selector plug-in: An updated version of my Mobile Theme Selector plug-in that lets you to choose your mobile theme name.
• Pingomatic plug-in: A new plug-in that automatically pings Pingomatic service whenever someone publishes something new to a Graffiti site. I personally had to prefer Autopinger as an ASP.NET powered site that I've been using for almost one year but unfortunately their XML-RPC service didn't work fine.
• RSS Extender plug-in: Default RSS feed for Graffiti Beta 2 doesn't include some elements and one of them is <author /> element that is something necessary for some aggregators. I wrote a plug-in that adds this element to RSS feed items automatically and sets it to the site's title. Note that RSS specification expects this element to be an email address but who wants to share his email in RSS feed?!
• Community Reactions extension: Same as my Community Reactions extension that retrieves reactions for a post from Google Blog search and Technorati.
• Post Navigator extension: My Post Navigator extension that displays links to the next and previous posts for a particular post.
• Search Relevancy extension: A modified version of Search Relevancy extension that shows relevant posts for visitors who come from search engines.
• Underground theme: I didn't make my blog theme available for public download before but now it's a part of Graffiti Extras.
• Windows Mobile theme: My Windows Mobile theme which is appropriate for IE Mobile visitors and can be used with Mobile Theme Selector plug-in.

My plan is to add new extras to the project for the final version of Graffiti and release the first RTW version with it.

Graffiti Extras is licensed under a New BSD license which is my favorite license and the most appropriate license for such a project.

Here I want to invite other developers to join me on the project to add their own extras and help the community by providing a single way to bring lots of features to Graffiti. I also want to let you know that I'm listening to your requests for new extras if you're not a developer but would like to have something new in Graffiti. I may develop such extensions if I can find it useful for others.

I wrote about everything but where is the download link? You can download Graffiti Extras 1.0 Beta 1 from here. Source code is also available for you in a separate package there.