Creating Content for Your Web Site
Graffiti supports multiple forms of content:
- Categories
- Posts
- Widgets
- Tags
- Comments
Categories
A category is the main unit of organization for Graffiti. Every post must be added to exactly one category. The limitation of one enables Graffiti to build smart meaningful urls and avoid search engine optimization penalties associated with duplicate content. Graffiti also supports child categories. Each parent category can have its own set of child categories.
When you create a category, Graffiti posts the category label on your site’s home page.
Although typically you will create posts after you create your categories, Graffiti gives you the flexibility of creating categories on the fly as you create your posts.
At the category level you can specify the category name, the names of any links to the category, category descriptive text, meta data, and so on.
When you click on a category label, Graffiti displays on the web page all posts assigned to the category. The example below shows the list of posts associated with the Getting Started category.
Click here to get started with creating a category.
Posts
The main form of content in Graffiti is a post. In most cases, you will assign a post to a category. When you publish your post, the post title and brief post description display on the category page.
While a post has just three required values (Category, Body, and Title) there are quite a few other values and tools you can use to enhance your content and your user’s experience. At the post level you can specify the post title, a description of the post content, tags, meta data, and so on. You can also add links to other files in the post body.
Click here to get started with creating a post.
Widgets
Widgets are data that you can add to the sidebars of your web pages. Graffiti allows experienced web developers to create their own custom widgets, but also supports a number of pre-packaged widgets for which you can specify the properties. The following example shows 3 types of pre-packaged widgets in the right sidebar of the page.
Users with little web development experience can click here for additional information about using the pre-packaged widgets.
Experienced web developers can click here for additional information about widgets.
Tags
A tag is a keyword or term associated with a post. Tags give you flexibility in structuring your Web site. While Graffiti posts must exist in only a single category, you can relate a post to multiple categories by using tags. A tag cloud is a pre-packaged widget.
The tag cloud displays in the left or right sidebar with links to all posts that have tags.
Graffiti ranks tags by the number of posts with which the tags are associated so that the most used tags have the largest font size. In the tag cloud in the example above, chalk and themes are the tags associated with the greatest number of posts. When you drag your cursor over a link in the tag cloud, Graffiti tells you how many posts have the tag.
Click here to get started with creating a tag cloud.
Comments
A comment is simply a user’s response to a post. Comments are a useful way of soliciting feedback from visitors to your Web site.
When you click on the comment link, Graffiti opens the post and displays the comment, along with the date and time the comment was published, at the bottom of the post.
Graffiti allows you to specify that comments be enabled for a specific length of time and that they are checked for spam before they are published. If Graffiti thinks a comment is spam, it will notify you so you can approve the comment displaying it.
You also must ensure the post is enabled for comments. This must be done at either the site-wide level or at the post level. The post-level setting always overrides the site-wide default setting.
Click here to get started with comments.
