The social software experts from Telligent released a new CMS officially yesterday, Graffiti CMS version 1.0. As a Telligent Partner, we’re pleased to be among the first hosts to announce support for Graffiti Hosting. All of our shared hosting plans are compatible with Graffiti CMS and provide all the features you should need to get up and running with a new Graffiti CMS based website.

Not Just Another Blog Engine!

When you first look at Graffiti you’re probably going to think “oh great, another blog engine… Just what we needed … NOT!”. However, truth be told, Graffiti is a great blogging engine, if that’s what you need. But Graffiti offers so much more than just a blogging engine.  Graffiti was actually developed to be a full content management system with even support for workflows, search engine optimized urls and content and built-in versioning (surprisingly, something many CMS’s lack today). In fact, the Graffiti website is built using Graffiti (dogfooding at it’s finest).

The image above is that of a test blog I was working on to make sure Windows Live Writer was fully supported (and it is) and to see just how easy it is to setup a new graffiti based site.

Getting Started with Graffiti at AppliedI.net

If you’re ready to take the plunge into Graffiti and test it out for your own website or blog here’s what you’ll need to make sure you have enabled on your site:

1. Support for ASP.NET 2.0 or later (remember, if your current website runs in ASP.NET 1.1, you’ll need to create a new website to run ASP.NET 2.0 you can only run one or the other on a particular site).

2. Virtual Directory Settings - If you plan to run Graffiti on a subfolder (perhaps for a blog) then you’ll want to set the folder it’s running in as an application using the virtual directory tool in the control panel. If you get stuck just email support and they’ll help you out.

That’s it! Graffiti doesn’t need any more than that to get up and running immediately, but as always if you get stuck, email our support team and they’re familiar with the application already and should be able to help you out of a jam pretty quickly.

Great Features in Graffiti

1. Optional support for MS SQL2005 or MySQL - By default Graffiti uses the VistaDB engine which a lightweight alternative to SQL server 2005 that you can just upload and run.  If you prefer to use MSSQL or MySQL though it’s fully supported and you can easily update your web.config to support either.

2. Search Engine URLS built-in - If you’re going to build a website today or write a blog you have to have search engine ready URLs. Graffiti makes it easy to enable this right from the start.

3. Ability to support 3rd party templates & plug-ins - Today applications need to be extendable, Graffiti is! There’s already a Graffiti Marketplace and it won’t be long before we start seeing more 3rd party plugins. I can’t wait to see some of my favorite wordpress themes migrated over (like Cutline, nudge, nudge)

4. Support for Windows Live Writer - Yes I love WLW, it’s the best blog editor I’ve used to date and it’s supported in Graffiti

5. Support for BlogML - All the top blog engines today are supporting BlogML either built-in or through 3rd party plugins. BlogML provides an XML markup for Blogs. This allows you to easily backup and restore your blog but even better it allows you an easy way to export and import your blog between different blog engines! Looking to switch from Wordpress to Graffiti? No Problem, use BlogML. Looking to go from BlogEngine.Net to Graffiti, Not a problem, BlogML!

6. It’s made by Telligent - These guys are simply awesome. Community server (their flagship product) powers some of the most popular and busy sites on the Internet, MySpace, Xbox.com, asp.net to name a few.  They understand social media, ASP.NET and Web 2.0 and know how to code for it.

7. There’s a free version! - Everyone wants to test the waters so Telligent is providing an Express version of Graffiti CMS for you to experiment with or run on your personal site. If you run a commercial site then they ask you to license it and licenses start at just $399 and comes with support from Telligent.

8. Block spam with Akismet - Today comment spam runs rampant on the Internet and all the best engines support Akismet. On our own blog it’s blocked over 20,000 spam messages since we launched the blog just a few months ago.

9. It’s not just for blogs.  With the proper templates it can be used for any type of site and there’s rumors of some e-commerce support? Very exciting stuff.

10. It can be hosted at AppliedI.net - Not only do we support it but to celebrate the launch, we’re offer 25% off your initial term with any shared hosting account. Just use the coupon code: graffiti and get 25% off your initial hosting term (sign up for a month get 25% off that first month, signup for a year get 25% off that first year!). I’d recommend starting with the VS-1 small business hosting plan but the ValuePlus Personal Hosting Plan works just as well when you’re just getting started.

Where to go next?

Sound good? Ready to kick the tires? Head over to www.graffiticms.com and download the express version of Graffiti. All of our plans support multiple websites so you can create a new site for it and publish it there or you can publish it to a subweb of your existing site. If you’re hosted somewhere else or want to start a new account, use the coupon code: graffiti and signup for new hosting here at www.appliedi.net. As I mentioned, if you get stuck getting started with Graffiti, just email support and we’ll help you get it running.

Oh, and we’d love to hear your feedback on this application.

Andre recently blogged about how many people are using wordpress as more than just a blog engine, they’re using it as a full blown content management system (CMS). I’m pretty well versed in Wordpress and what’s available for it and today I was looking around today for new themes and plug-ins we could integrate with the AppliedI One-Click Wordpress installer and came across a couple items that caught my attention, Mimbo an online magazine theme by Darren Hoyt and WP e-Commerce, an e-commerce solution for wordpress by Instinct Entertainment.

Creating your online magazine with Wordpress

Mimbo is a magazine-style Wordpress theme that makes use of the WP template tag system to create a very non-traditional layout. You can see a live demo of mimbo here to get a feel for just what it does out of the box.

On Darren’s blog you’ll see many posts of sites that are based on the Mimbo design. Here’s a few links to some of the sites that are mimbo powered:

• http://idahoforronpaul.com/
• http://tricvoice.medianewsonline.com/
• http://www.sakejournal.com/
• http://www.douglasturner.com/

So with wordpress, a theme like mimbo and a little creativity you should be able to launch a pretty impressive online magazine yourself.  Mimbo isn’t the only magazine style wordpress theme out there as there are a number of commercial solutions available too:

• http://www.wpremix.com ($$$)
• http://hyalineskies.com/wordpress/gridlock/ (FREE)
• http://sandbox.limpag.com/ (FREE)
• http://news.revolutiontheme.com/ ($$$)
• http://www.wp-magazine.com/ ($$$)

And that’s just a sampling of the vast number of magazine style themes out there for wordpress. Not to mention the thousands of other themes available.

Creating your Wordpress powered online store with WP e-Commerce

Let’s face it, the Internet has completely changed the way today’s consumer shops and has made virtually every brick and mortar store with an online store an International business.  E-Commerce is here to stay and as technology changes and evolves so does E-Commerce.  Enter, the Web 2.0 era of E-Commerce, blogs/CMS applications merging with shopping carts.

WP e-Commerce is a new plugin for wordpress that allows you to e-commerce enable your wordpress powered website.  WP e-Commerce is available as both a free version (for personal use), an upgraded version (GOLD version, $15) and a business class solution ($250).  For the features you get, even at $250, it’s a reasonably priced product.

Here’s a quick run down of the features:

• New - Search Engine Friendly URLs / Permalinks (latest RC)
• New - Marketing options under shop options (latest RC)
• New - Members Only Module
• Customizable pagination for product listing
• Unlimited products & categories
• AJAX powered Sliding Shopping Cart
• Shop front highlighting for newly added products
• AJAX powered Web 2.0 DropShop - additional gold module
• Grid View - additional gold module
• Fancy AJAX Alerts on Add to Cart
• Purchase history for logged in users
• New and improved Audio Player Module for selling MP3 files
• Chinese Language file
• Share this / Digg Product social networking promo tools
• Downloadable CSV files
• Detailed Purchase Log & Filters
• Configurable Tax settings including USA & Canada
• PayPal IPN
• URL linking to products and images
• – Next version
• RSS product feed widget
• Google Cart

Best of all, WP e-Commerce can integrate into your wordpress based site as either separate pages or widgets and the available widgets currently include:

• AJAX Shopping Cart Widget
• Categories & Brands Widget
• Donations Widget
• Product Specials Widget

A few sites based off of WP e-Commerce include (this list was taken from their website and may change at any time):

• www.orangutan-appeal.org.uk
• www.tabletalk.com
• www.imagecubes.com
• www.koloroo.com
• Eden Ripley
• Ochblog
• Crafty Designs
• Standard Electronics

Best of all, the installation of WP e-Commerce couldn’t be easier, upload the plug-in, enable it and configure it. That’s it.

I can see WP e-Commerce being used by people selling online e-books or audio files, subscription based services, donations, merchandise (it includes the ability to assign attributes like size, color, etc to products) and any number of simple e-commerce needs. So if you’re looking for a low cost, easy to use e-commerce solution and already have a wordpress enabled site or plan to use wordpress, give WP e-Commerce a peek. It may not have the features and functionality of the larger, more expensive solutions but for the price, it packs a pretty nice punch.

I encourage you to visit the WP e-Commerce site and experiment with it today.

It was previously mentioned that I was attending the ASP.NET connections / DotNetNuke OpenForce conference in Las Vegas last week, I returned this week and must say I am extremely excited about everything I saw and all the people I spoke with while in Las Vegas and this blog post is an overview of what I saw or experienced out there.

A little about DotNetNuke

If you’re not familiar with DotNetNuke, it’s an open-source content management system (CMS) that is extremely popular. In fact, at the conference Shaun Walker (father to DotNetNuke) stated that the dotnetnuke.com community has reached over 500,000 users and I forget the exact number but it was something like 4,000,000+ downloads. Also announced OpenForce was the availability of DotNetNuke 4.7 (and if you’re planning hosting dotnetnuke at appliedi.net, don’t worry our one-click installer was already upgraded to 4.7).

Today website builders like our own free sitebuilder are commonly used by novice internet users that want to build a website without learning HTML. A CMS like DotNetNuke evolves the sitebuilder and I suppose would be the Web 2.0 equivalent of yesterday’s website builder. With DotNetNuke (or almost any other CMS) you’re able to assign multiple users roles to your site and allow them control over specific areas of the site so that they can edit or maintain the content in that one area.  You add to that the extensibility of hundreds of free and paid templates/skins for dotnetnuke and hundreds of modules for everything ranging from a guestbook to a full blown e-commerce application (like aspdotnetstorefront) that are just simple click and deploy applications and you start to see the power of DotNetNuke. Want to change your site’s look and feel? Just change the template. All the content remains the same but the look is completely different.  Want to add a forum to your site? Just enable the built in forums or purchase one of the 3rd party forum modules and all your users are already enabled and can begin posting immediately.

DotNetNuke is definitely an exciting application and one we’re proud to have hosted and supported on our platform since it’s inception.

A little about the DotNetNuke OpenForce 2007

Tom from seablickconsulting has a pretty good day by day review of all three days at DNN OpenForce and they can be viewed here:

• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 1
• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 2
• DNN OpenForce 07 Day 3

In fact, Tom’s blog is really chock full of DNN information so I highly recommend subscribing to it.

Expect many more DNN related blog articles to come from us in the coming weeks and a few very exciting DNN related announcements.

Lately we’ve been blogging about about Wordpress here at AppliedI.net. The reasons for that are plenty but mostly it’s because many customers have acknowledged that they find it a great tool and have found these articles useful.  As Andre pointed out earlier many people are starting to use blogging tools like wordpress as a full CMS application. 

One of the great features wordpress has is that you can enable a feature called permalinks.  According to Wikipedia:

A permalink is a URL that points to a specific blogging entry even after the entry has passed from the front page into the blog archives. Because a permalink remains unchanged indefinitely, it is less susceptible to link rot.

A permalink is useful as it provides an easy to remember URL to a blog article and is also pretty search engine friendly.

How permalinks used to be done on Windows

Previously if you wanted to enable permalinks in your Windows based blog you had only a couple options:

1. using a custom 404 redirect as explained on the Keyboard face blog.
2. using an ISAPI filter, such as Dean Lee’s isapi filter.

These worked well and I’ve used both in blog. But today, thanks to isapi-rewrite 3.0 from helicontech.com we have a new way to do it. Helicontech’s latest version of isapi-rewrite is mod_rewrite compatible. Mod-rewrite is a URL rewriting engine used in apache web servers and since almost all PHP apps are initially written for apache based servers they make use of mod_rewrite rules. Helicontech saw this and rewrote their own isapi-rewrite tool to be mod_rewrite compatible.

This means if you have an application like wordpress that makes use of mod_rewrite you’ll be able to use the same rules and just upload a .htaccess file to your Windows hosted account and you’re done!  It couldn’t be an easier. Fortunately for you, AppliedI.net includes isapi-rewrite 3.0 for free with all shared hosting accounts so you have this functionality immediately.

How to do permalinks in wordpress in IIS6 with your blog in the root folder

Many users put their blog in their web root folder so when you go to http://www.example.com/ the blog comes up immediately. This tutorial portion assumes this is where your blog is. If this isn’t where you’re blog is please read the next section.

Once you’ve installed your wordpress blog on your site you’ll want to log into the admin section and select options and then select permalinks. You’re going to make the following changes:

1. Under Common Options:

Select Custom, specify below. Enter the custom structure as: /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

2. Under Optional:

We’re going to enter a category base and tag base. This is important because you’re going to categorize your articles (to make them easier for the visitors to browse) and tag your articles to help with searches and also allow your related articles to be grouped. For Category base: /category/ For Tag base: /tags/

3. Update Permalink Structure

Once these are set you’re going to click the button, update permalink structure. This is going to update these settings your database. We’re not done though. We still have to upload the .htaccess file. 

4. Create .htaccess file

You’ll create a new text file and name it .htaccess. In this text file you’re going to include the text:

# Helicon ISAPI_Rewrite configuration file
# Version 3.0.0.21

# BEGIN WordPress
# <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# </IfModule>
# END WordPress

You’re going to want to enter the text just like that and then upload this file to your website’s root folder. That’s it! Permalinks should now work.

How to setup wordpress permalinks for /blog/ on IIS6 (or windows hosting)

The steps in this section of the tutorial are just like the steps above except this assumes your blog is in a subfolder called /blog/ so your blog is accessed as: http://www.example.com/blog/. If your blog is in a subfolder other than blog you’d change the instructions below substituting your folder name for /blog/. The only step that changes is step #4.

Once you’ve installed your wordpress blog on your site you’ll want to log into the admin section and select options and then select permalinks. You’re going to make the following changes:

1. Under Common Options:

Select Custom, specify below. Enter the custom structure as: /archives/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/

2. Under Optional:

We’re going to enter a category base and tag base. This is important because you’re going to categorize your articles (to make them easier for the visitors to browse) and tag your articles to help with searches and also allow your related articles to be grouped. For Category base: /category/ For Tag base: /tags/

3. Update Permalink Structure

Once these are set you’re going to click the button, update permalink structure. This is going to update these settings your database. We’re not done though. We still have to upload the .htaccess file. 

4. Create .htaccess file

You’ll create a new text file and name it .htaccess. In this text file you’re going to include the text:

# Helicon ISAPI_Rewrite configuration file
# Version 3.0.0.21

# BEGIN WordPress
# <IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /blog/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# </IfModule>
# END WordPress

You’ll notice RewriteBase has now changed to reflect the /blog/ folder instead of /.  That’s because we’re assuming your blog is in a subfolder named /blog/. Once you’ve modified this file, save it and then upload it into the subfolder /blog/ where your blog is stored. It’s import that the .htaccess file go in the actual folder you’re doing the rewrites on and not the parent folder.

That’s it! Permalinks should now work.

Additional Information

Permalinks are very important as you can imagine and the .htaccess rules above actually came initially from Perishable Press’s article The htaccess Rules for all WordPress Permalinks and have been updated for isapi-rewrite 3.0 compatibility.

If your hosted with a host that doesn’t support isapi-rewrite 3.0 for you blog you can learn more about our Wordpress Hosting by following that link.

WordPress has become so popular that I’m 90% sure that you have at least heard about the name. WordPress is in reality a blogger-like application that can be installed onto your own web hosting account.

With it you can even create your own community of bloggers, each person with his/her own blog, or you can have multiple authors on a single blog as well. Everything was thought of.

WordPress isn’t only this though. In essence yes. But it can be more, much more.

Many people, including myself use WordPress for more then just blogging. On my particular case, it’s the only CMS and it’s actually the platform that delivers all my website’s content to visitors. Everything dynamically!

In fact, I predict WordPress will turn into a full Content Management System such as Joomla, phpNuke or Post-Nuke. It really has the power for it. Actually it’s way more powerful and it can be much more secure then the ones I just mentioned. It’s all about patience and time to secure it.

Don’t worry, it isn’t insecure. But just like every other popular application, vulnerabilities are found more easily, and unfortunately they also become public from night to day. Again, a few tweaks here and there will kept your site secure from all the threats.

One of the things I’ve done on mine was to promptly restrict admin access to my IP only. Even if you have a dynamic IP and cannot do this, you can always restrict the IP range to your ISP. This is done by using rewrite rules.

More information on this can be found at:
http://blogsecurity.net/wordpress/article-210607/

Having this covered, WordPress can be your best pal on content management. Especially with the new tool from Microsoft: Windows Live Writer.

So with WordPress you’ll be able to submit new articles and update existing ones without even having to open a browser window.

What else could we ask for?

Plus with so many themes and plugins being developed for it, you can even sell cars through it. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? WordPress can do everything, really. Like I said it’s just a matter of putting time and effort into it, and it will become the perfect CMS for you, guaranteed.

Some interesting links:
Installation guide by Jess Coburn (Appliedi.net)
WordPress’ official plugin directory
WordPress’ official theme directory
Wordpress compatible Hosting