Before telling you about the new Graffiti Content Management System (CMS), I want to tell you about the company that is making it: Telligent. They have some of the best coders in the .NET universe working for them, including Rob Howard, one of the creators of ASP.NET. Their first terrific product was the Community Server. That is similar to The Beer House in many ways, but it's far more complex and it's not free for commercial use. Community Server includes the old .Text blog software but it's been improved a lot. It also has the overall best Forum module.

Due to the complexity of Community Server, many potential users did not spend much time on it, and they moved on to easier software (some of them moved to the Beer House). But now they've learned the error of their ways and they have a new CMS that is a million times easier to set up and use: Graffiti. Here is a link to some of their videos:

http://graffiticms.com/support/quickstarts/

We can learn a lot about user interface design by studying Graffiti. One of the coolest features is the way you can use the Windows Live Writer fat client on your local machine to compose and upload content. I'd like to learn more about the protocol Live Writer is using and possibly design support for that into the Beer House. Maybe we can talk Marco into including this in the next edition :)

As I understand it, the Graffiti source code is available but they make you pay if you want to use it for e-commerce. I *think* it's free for use by companies who are not using its e-commerce features, but I could be wrong.

I will likely play with this as a learning exercise. They don't have forums in it right now, but that is slated for version 2. For now it's a kick-butt blogging system that has some publishing features similar to the Beer House. But it's much easier to configure and deploy.

Eric

I just found out that they don't have CAPTCHA to prevent spam robots from commenting on blog posts. And they don't let user's create accounts, either. In V1 they only support admin accounts.

Still, the is a cool project with a lot of future potential.

The Windows Live Writer integration is the feature I most want to copy.

Eric

I spent some time investigating Windows Live Writer so I could figure out how to use it to upload content to The Beer House. I didn't do the grunt work yet, but I found some good info.

It can use several different protocols to upload content, among them being the MetaWeblog API. This is supported in .NET by the XML-RPC project.

This link is a post by Amit Leibov that describes how he added support for this to Dot Net Nuke (he's using the same idea as Graffiti - an HTTP handler):

http://amitleibov.info/dnn/Default.a...d=36&EntryID=3

And this link describes XML-RPC and the CookCumputing DLL that many people are using (including DNN and Graffiti):

http://www.xml-rpc.net/faq/xmlrpcnetfaq.html

Everyone needs to check out this short video on Live Writer - that convinced me that I need to look into this some more. It is super easy to create content this way!

http://scottw.blip.tv/file/446045/

Eric