When madprops.org first came into being, it was a shared site owned by me and three friends. We each had a blog and aggregated them on the main page. Over the years we lost a few people to other sites, until eventually I decided to take over the site completely.

So for a while now I've been wanting to move the main part of the site from the "/cs/blogs/mabster" folder back to the root. I thought about installing Community Server 2007 in the root of the site and running it concurrently with the "/cs" installation (against the same database), but that's overkill for just my blog.

So on the weekend I took a look at Telligent's other content-management solution, Graffiti.

Graffiti basically reduces content management down to its bare essentials: Posts and categories. You define categories (which may have subcategories), then create posts against those categories. You then have the ability to view individual posts, or to list posts by category. To facilitate blogging, Graffiti also gives you RSS feeds, comments and tags against your posts.

Best of all, Graffiti has a very simple skinning and layout engine, using NVelocity for its skins and a "widget" system for its sidebar boxes. I was able to throw together a skin for Graffiti at home (on an old XP box running IIS) that looks almost identical to my Mabsterama skin in only an hour or so.

I've had a few problems with my Graffiti trial so far:

The first was that when I installed Graffiti to the root of my site, it hosed any subfolders that were running their own ASP.NET applications (like Community Server and Sourcegear Vault). After a bit of searching on Google, I discovered this post on the Community Server forums that talks about wrapping your web.config's <system.web> section in a <location> tag. As I've said in the past, I'm a total ASP.NET newbie, so this was news to me. It totally fixed that issue for me.

The next issue is around the ASP.NET shared membership provider. I've bookmarked this blog post by Dan Bartels which describes how to make Graffiti use an existing ASP.NET membership store (for example, the one used by Community Server) so your users can log into Graffiti with the existing CS usernames and passwords. I've followed all of Dan's steps, but the only user I see in my Graffiti installation is the default "admin" user, so I've missed something there. I'll post about this when I solve it.

Lastly I've seen some weird layout problems when combining certain widgets. For example, if I place the Xbox 360 Gamercard widget in my sidebar above another widget (like the Tag Cloud or Del.icio.us links widgets), all hell breaks loose and I end up with widgets in the main part of my site instead of the sidebar. I haven't worked this one out yet, so for now I'm defining the sidebar boxes manually in the theme rather than relying on built-in widgets. Less than ideal.

Once I'm satisfied with my sandbox installation of Graffiti, I'll upload it to madprops.org and start blogging there instead. Rest assured that I'll give readers plenty of time to adjust their bookmarks. I may even move to FeedBurner beforehand so that RSS feeds are seamlessly updated. Stay tuned!