Okay, we thought we were done last week — what can I say… mea culpa? Turns out we had a bit more fit-and-finish to do. Well, beta 1 is done!!!
Everyone who signed up for the beta at Graffiticms.com will soon get an email from us with download details and setup instructions.
If you want to get there a little faster:
The official GraffitiCMS.com website will go live in the next few days and will have more information about Graffiti as well as a feature roadmap.
Please check-out the readme file that comes with the Graffiti download. The download also includes a Quickstart Graffiti site with the same content published on docs.graffiticms.com. It provides a great working example of Graffiti and also starts you with some content for helping learn Graffiti.
If you’re hearing about Graffiti for the first time…
Graffiti CMS is meant to be a really simple content publishing platform for individuals and small businesses. It’s designed first and foremost to be simple.
What about Community Server? There are no plans for Graffiti and Community Server to work together (even though initially we thought there might be). Graffiti and Community Server target 2 completely separate audiences. Community Server will continue to focus on being a best-of-breed community and social networking platform. Features from Graffiti, such as content management, will find their way into Community Server over time. But those plans will be announced later.
Why create another tool? We thought traditional “content management system” tools were complex. We believe customers want something simple, something light and friendly. For us the “CMS” in Graffiti means “content made simple” not the stuffy overloaded term “content management system”. Graffiti supports old-school content management system concepts such as workflow, revisions, content, files, and more but also bring in the fresh perspective of more modern publishing tools like blogs. We don’t think of it as a CMS, blog, or ‘tool’ but instead as a way to introduce more people to a better and simpler way to publish and share their thoughts and ideas.
Is Graffiti free? Yes, our plan is that we will have 2 versions of Graffiti. A free version and either one or two commercial versions. Our free version uses Microsoft Access for content storage and our commercial version will use SQL Server.
Is Graffiti a blogging tool? Graffiti helps you publish content. If you want to organize that content as a “blog” Graffiti makes this really easy. We’ve included a couple blog themes in the beta.
We’re excited to hear your feedback about Graffiti. Until our site goes live please email feedback/bugs to:
Thanks for your patience. It took us longer to get Graffiti Beta 1 out the door than we wanted. We’ve tried 3 times to get this right over the past couple of years and we’re really proud of what the team has done. We listened to what people were asking for. Hopefully you’ll love it!
Hopefully we’ll also have an announcement about our other new product Reporting Server (demo site). But more on that later!
