Graffiti CMS Futures
Edit 3/28/2009: I was separated from employment with Telligent on 2/13/2009, and no longer have any idea of what Telligent's plans for Graffiti CMS might be.
On November 14, I became the PM for Telligent's Graffiti CMS product, and I am pumped! When I was first introduced to Graffiti at an internal Telligent meeting in August 2007, I was instantly in love with the product. It allowed me to develop a website quickly, giving me control over the content via the UI. One of the first things I asked when I joined the product team in October was ask if I could work on Graffiti, and my boss Josh (who is here to make others better) was happy to oblige.
As you can see from the product history below, we were pretty aggressive in our releases, and had been largely quiet in the months after Graffiti CMS 1.1 release:
- Product History
- December 5, 2007 - Graffiti 1.0 Beta 1
- January 22, 2008 - Graffiti 1.0 Beta 2
- January 25, 2008 - Graffiti 1.0 Beta 2 Refresh
- February 18, 2008 - Graffiti 1.0 Released
- March 11, 2008 - Graffiti CMS 1.0 Service Pack 1
- Added additional ways to get data that can be used in Graffiti themes
- New and improved events
- Chalk additions and improvements
- New advanced functionality that plugins can use
- Security Enhancements
- Migration Tool Improvements
- 30 bug fixes and other changes
- May 27, 2008 - Graffiti CMS 1.1 Beta
- June 20, 2008 - Graffiti CMS 1.1
- Bulk comment management
- Permissions functionality
- Ability to delete and rename users
- Packages
- More than 30 bug fixes
As announced on the GraffitiCMS site, here are the high points of what we are targeting for the upcoming year:
- Product Roadmap
- December 22, 2008 - Graffiti 1.2 beta release
- January 5, 2009 - Graffiti 1.2 release
- This is a service pack release to address issues reported via the Graffit CMS forums and elsewhere
- Early Q2, 2009 - Graffiti 2.0
- Vertical based theme support – users will be able to use from a set of verticals (blog, gaming, training, etc) when they first setup a site. Once the selection is made, Graffiti will then configure itself for the current vertical. This includes any necessary data changes (such as new categories and posts) as well as adding necessary widgets and navigation elements. At least two new verticals in addition to the three we have today will be included. Finally, many of the common theming tasks (alignment, color, and fonts) will be moved to the public part of the site.
- N level categories – Graffiti will support unlimited nesting of categories
- Localization – Graffiti will support localizing the control panel and will remove any hard coded strings from the public part of the site.
- Marketplace – the marketplace integration will be expanded to provider a richer experience and make it much easier for users to find new themes, plug-ins, and widgets.
- Early Q3 2009 - Graffiti 2.5
- Dynamic forms – users will easily be able to build forms, collect data, and view the results.
- Dynamic theming – continue work on theming to make it easier to manage navigation, widgets, and other custom areas of themes directly from public UI.
- Early Q4 - Graffiti 3.0
- Graffiti forums
- Hosted Graffiti
Disclaimer: Roadmaps are subject to change, but this is what we have in mind at this point in time.
What is not called out here is our commitment to improving the documentation and support for Graffiti, both from an end-user and a developer standpoint. We want to make it even easier for everyone to use the product, and you will see improvements in that area either coinciding with or preceding the Graffiti 2.0 release. Our team will also have a stronger presence in the support forums. And also what is not called out are architecture updates to give Graffiti a cleaner and richer way to provide forums and better enable others to supply additional functionality to the product.
I am excited about what's ahead for Graffiti! I am always looking for feedback, so please do drop me a note if you have any questions or concerns or suggestions about Graffiti CMS!
