Graffiti CMS

By Jacques Bron on Monday, March 24 2008

I have built this site with Graffiti CMS. Graffiti CMS is a very recent product (version 1.0) released in february 2008. Graffiti CMS has been developped by Telligent, the company that makes Community Server. Communit Server is a powerful online community management system that is used to run some of the most important communities on the Internet (MySpace, National Geographic Online, XBox 360, and others).

Before choosing Graffiti CMS, I tested a few other blog/cms systems. One of my criterias of choice was that the system should work under Windows/IIS, preferently in ASP.NET because it is a development platform that I know and wich I use. And, thanks to the extensibility of Graffiti CMS, that will allow me to create my own extensions and plugins. I have also tested Blogengine .NET, an open source project, very nicely designed, but the simplicity of the admin interface of Graffiti CMS and its "widgets" system finally convinced me. Graffiti CMS works "out of the box", which means there is no complex installation procedure. Just copy the files to your web server and run it. You can choose between four database backends : VistaDB, MS Access, MS SQL Server or MySQL. After testing the VistaDB version on my PC, I installed the product on my web server with an SQL Server 2005 connection. Everything was set up and running very quickly. Different site themes are included in Graffiti CMS and you can modify them or create your own themes, in order to personalize the appearance of your site.

The theme I selected has been slightly modified by putting one of my own photos as the page banner (see top of page). You can see the original photo on my photoblog.

If you are looking for a blog/cms system that is simple to use yet powerful and extensible, try Graffiti CMS and don't hesitate to let me know what you think.