Two posts ago I talked about my initial experiences in getting Graffiti set up on a machine at home, co-existing with my existing Community Server installation. I'm a lot further down that path now, and almost ready to deploy to the live madprops.org server, which will at last let me move my blog back to the root folder instead of /cs/blogs/mabster subfolder.

Using Graffiti's NVelocity-based theme engine, I've managed to get it to look almost identical to the current Mabsterama theme, with a few visual improvements. Something I'm very proud of is that I've essentially rewritten the theme using much better CSS-based layout rather than table-based hacks. The site's code looks much cleaner and feels more responsive somehow.

There are only a few things left to sort out before I go live, and I'm hoping that they get resolved in the final release of Graffiti 1.1 (I'm using the beta).

The first is that Graffiti won't let me use non-alphanumeric characters (other than the hyphen) in my tags. Therefore my "C#" tag becomes "C", and my "ADO.NET" tag becomes "ADO-NET". I can live with the latter, but the former completely changes the meaning of the tag, so that's not ideal.

Secondly, the tag cloud widget in Graffiti seems to be very inaccurate compared to Community Server's. It completely excludes some very popular tags in favour of less-popular ones. I'll have to wait for this to get sorted out 'coz I loves me some tag cloud goodness.

The migration tool to pull posts in from Community Server seems to work well - it manages to pull in all 1200 or so of the posts from this blog. I'm still undecided as to whether to bring the old stuff across though. Maybe I'd be better off leaving the old content in CS and making a fresh start. What do you think? Leave me a comment.

If I do bring the old content across, the ability to redirect incoming requests for the old post URLs to the new Graffiti post would be great. I've experimented with a few tools that purport to do that for Graffiti, but because I want CS to remain enabled as an ASP.NET application they don't seem to work - CS handles the request before Graffiti can redirect it. I may have to do the redirect from CS itself, but I have no idea how just yet. Some more reading and forum-posting required.

All in all I'm really enjoying Graffiti, and I can recommend it to anyone looking for a non-commercial content engine. Bring on 1.1!