Telligent's Graffiti

I may work here full time, but I can't deny the usefulness of the GraffitiCMS as easily one of the simplest, most powerful CMS's I've used in quite some time.

It's what we run our website on here at MarkupNinjas, and we couldn't ask for more. Sure, its got a few kinks, but for the most part, it does its job extreeeemely well. In fact, we were able to skin the entire MarkupNinjas.com site from custom code out. Thats rare, to be able to use your very own markup, which is huge for us, in a CMS skin. We've always kind of been expression engine enthusiasts, because it was so flexible with  markup, but GraffitiCMS just sort of, takes expression engine, increases the skinning learning curve a bit, and then after that, makes it seamless and a no brainer to skin.

It's loaded to the gills with really edgy features too. Right when I login, I can see that my traffic has fallen horribly since our site was featured on www.faveup.com under CSS Websites. Goes to show, I need to start submitting more to design sites, I think the designers over at Always Creative did a fantastic job on our design. Kudo's as well to our logo designer, over at Model Concept, where we snatched him from Anxiety App fame and a few other Apple award winning applications. Anyways, back to the CMS :D

Getting a bit deeper into skinning and theming, they've got a beautiful UI setup, and its extremely easy to follow.

You can dive right in, and right from the control panel, change the Navigation, no programming knowledge required, no .Net experience needed. Fan.Tastic we say! While one of the staff is a solid programmer in .Net, we don't typically like to focus on that, and try to stay more toward the markup side of things, so being able to skin the entire website with solid, clean markup the way we wanted to was amazing, and so easy to follow how to do it. Right out of the gate you see the entire tab dedicated to presentation. Then themes, and after a bit of skimming help docs (which sorely -sorely- need to be updated) and forum posts, I was up and running on skinning in about 30 minutes. There were a few complicated parts that no help exists on, but with a bit of ingenuity, the pain points go away, and some essentially difficult to impossible things in Wordpress or Expression Engine become crystal clear and easy with GraffitiCMS.

Once I worked out my nav, I decided to dive right into the default them and just gut it, and start over. I deleted the stylesheet, the views, and left the necessary layout files. From there, I dropped my markup in.

Whats great about this is that as you edit online, if you feel so inclined to do so, its got a revision tracker. This thing tracks revisions for -everything-. Posts, layouts, views, anything on the site really!

Another really slick feature, is these hover menu's. They've got all tags associated with each section. Hover over Post and say you need to put in the author of the post. Not a problem with GraffitiCMS, just click User, it will insert the necessary code where your cursor is left. Really nice, no more swimming in help docs just to remember that obscure code piece, which is good, because the help docs are still extremely young.

All in all, I'm overly happy with graffiti. There's so many more features, like Google Analytics drop and go support, extremely deep reporting levels, author management, categories and tagging, file management, SUPER easy install (how could I have forgot that one), its all here and then some. It easily blew Word Press out of the water, if not for the custom markup capabilities alone, the version tracking and the reporting just pushed me right over the edge. It's still young, theres still a pretty steep learning curve, but its overall a fantastic piece of work.