We've had more than a few questions lately about the future of Graffiti.
First of all, I apologize that we haven't published more information. Graffiti was started as a small project to test out some ideas and concepts that we eventually wanted to build into our other products. We didn't do a very good job anticipating the level of interest it received. Nevertheless, we continued to fully support Graffiti, even if we neglected to publish details about its future.
Secondly, we were not fully prepared for the effort required for version 2.0 of Graffiti after releasing version 1.2 in December. While we had every intention of releasing version 2.0 this spring we quickly found that we were understaffed and not in a position to dedicate more people to both Graffiti and Community Server. We decided that we needed to put those people / resources into Telligent's core products to accomplish some of our very aggressive plans for the next release of Community Server and Evolution, thus slipping Graffiti 2.0.
We have always seen Graffiti as being a perfect tool for individuals and small businesses where Telligent's other products were not a good fit. We also see Graffiti as a means to experiment with new development concepts - such as the work with did with NVelocity in Graffiti's "Chalk" runtime themeing. Graffiti will continue to be this type of application and I do want to re-affirm Telligent's plan to continue investing in Graffiti. Active development will pick back up again shortly with a release of Graffiti 2.0 in early summer.
Lastly, there are some changes in the roadmap for Graffiti's future. We will announce some of these closer to the 2.0 release.
Hi
Glad to hear Graffiti is still a product. It is a great piece of software and perfectly fills the requirements of a lot of SME's. Looking forward to v2 in the summer now and if we can help in anyway - drop us a line.
Keep up the good work,
So is this assured that Graffiti will be picking up once again - in the summer. Even if it is delayed but at least it would be still released with 2.0 in the summer?
Perhaps it's time to consider open-sourcing Graffiti. That's be a much better alternative to letting it die a slow death, which is what appears to be happening.
If you Google around a little bit, you will see that the user base is slipping, and with the recent release of BlogEngine 1.5 that will probably continue without some REAL advances on the Graffiti platform.
Seriously - I second open source. There is a big community of ASP.NET developers who love, embraced, extended and recommend Graffiti. And if you were so short staffed, then why did you lay off so many people? I don't feel that this post really answered any questions. I'd hate to change blog engines, but I don't want to be left in the dust.
@Lee & @Dana
OSS'ing is something we did consider, but for now we believe keeping the development in house is a better option for moving forward.
We are rethinking some parts of our roadmap around Graffiti to make sure we can give it the best chance of thriving. We understand this causes concern and frustration for customers, but in the end we believe this is the best thing for Graffiti.
I know we have said it way too many times, but we do believe we can deliver an excellent update in the summer and get ourselves back on a more frequent release cycle.
Thanks,
Scott
"OSS'ing is something we did consider, but for now we believe keeping the development in house is a better option for moving forward."
I strongly, nay, vehemently disagree:
1. As a company you have problems assigning resources to the project.
2. Not only that, you even have a problem just posting a timely notice about that fact. Even the forums are like a desert sometimes.
3. You have lost _some_ credibility with _some_ customers. We will be moving away from Graffiti CMS and no longer consider it appropriate for our customers.
4. You will face more competition this summer. The OSS community of ASP.NET has been taking off like a rocket the past 2 years. The Oxite project alone has more potential. It sucked upon release, and it took about 3 weeks for the community to release some serious fixes.
5. This project already has the OSS 'feel'. That's hard to quantify, but I think it does. It seems like a natural fit for Graffiti CMS.
7. It will be adopted, I cannot guarantee that, but I strongly feel it will have developers all over it the day you release it on Codeplex.
I don't know much about your company, but what experience has Telerik with OSS. Is your decision based on rational facts or fear of loss of control or revenue? It would appreciate if you could elaborate on that.
I come back to your site months after the post jeeze almost 6 now and no change.. Grafitti...Needs to be painted over
Is there any detailed roadmap for 2.0? If Graffiti is to be more than a blogging platform, I'd like to see some more modules out-of-the-box - like newsletters, forms, shopping cart, etc. Any plans? For now, we chose Kentico CMS .NET, but it would be good to have some lightweight alternative...
I am running Graffiti, and have done several installs with Graffiti. Every client I have done an install for loves it.
I agree with other posts, why not make this OSS? I would be willing to contribute my time and code, as I have done a number of customizations. It's a great little product, serves a niche, and I'd hate to see it disappear.
I love Graffiti, but I am very concerned about its future and your commitment to it. If the future is anything like the past, bad news... I will not resell this product until I can gain some confidence in your support of the product, or I can have some skin in the game in the open source community.
Hello?
I don't know if these comments are being monitored, but there are several (paying) customers giving feedback and asking questions. If these comments are monitored then it's pretty rude not answering.
Just saying... If you want your customers to abandon your product and give up hope, the best thing to do is radio silence.
@Mike
> s your decision based on rational facts or fear of loss of control or revenue? It would appreciate if you could elaborate on that.
No fear. We simply believe we have a vision for something slightly different than others have done. We would like to build that and see where it goes before we relinquish control.
I understand the argument for not letting Graffiti die. This is partially why we considered OSS in the first place.
However, there are already plenty of OSS alternatives available. At this point, I would rather see us make a bet that we could do something interesting instead of simply giving up and adding another OSS project to the list.
@Mike
> I don't know if these comments are being monitored, but there are several (paying) customers giving feedback and asking questions. If these comments are monitored then it's pretty rude not answering.
Sorry for the delay. I (scottw@telligent.com) mainly manage this blog and I had eye surgery a couple of weeks ago and I am a bit behind.
@Patrick Moore - we are still working through some scenarios. We don't want to be "yet another CMS". All I can say now is we are focusing on continuing to make Graffiti easier to use and more rewarding for our users. Features will fall in place from there.
It will be another month before we are in a position to release more details.
The proof is in the pudding. I don't have much faith that 2.0 will see the light of day. I'll bet your layoffs last month didn't help the understaffing situation any.
Whoops...my mistake. Layoffs at Telligent were in February, not March. Still, I don't see that helping the lack of resources problem.
If you only add one feature, can you make it an export so we can all easily move onto something with a future?
Thanks
I'll second the request for an export.
A great product...but VERY VERY poor management. I bought the product while it was BETA but have yet to implement anything due to poor business coordination of the product.
I wanted to use this for many smaller sites and have asked and asked for a "market" for people to develop custom themes and small changes.
Talk talk talk.... but nothing ever happens. I have been hearing "were going to do something" for over 9 months to a year now with pretty much nothing happening.
What your are not doing is WALKING YOUR TALK which is why many of us are just pissed off. We spent money, supported, and hyped your product while you launched your product to only be left hanging.
Laying staff on and then telling you don't have resources is just one more example of the crap.
Based on this experience, when I need a bigger and better products, I don't think Community Server or other Telligent products will be on the list.
I don't need to support another technology company with smart people who can't run a business, manage a product or customer expectations.
Is there a reference document for all of the chalk and macros available within the presentation views? I have seen some references to methods and paramenters that I don't know a good source for learning more apart from copying other people's examples. Any help appreciated.
If you don't like OSS, what about out-sourcing? Little-to-no overhead compared to full-time employees. Personally, I develop custom apps for and make custom modifications to many different platforms like GraffitiCMS, BlogEngine and DNN - just to name a few.
"For lack of vision, the people perish."