April 2008 - Posts

• Enhance your Graffiti powered blog

  Graffiti is an awesome CMS and an excellent blogging platform. But there a few advanced features that are common in blogs but don't really make much sense in a general CMS which we left out on purpose. The idea was that we would create an official Telligent Graffiti plugin to add these blogging features for people using Graffiti to run a blog. The Blog Extensions plugin was one of the first things I got to work on when I switched from the CS/Harvest team to the Graffiti team at Telligent. It was nice to take some of the experience I had from working on the blogging component in Community Server and use it on another project. We decided to start with four features for the initial version of the plugin: Support for receiving and automatically sending both trackbacks and pingbacks. These are two different protocols for the same purpose - to let another blogger know that you linked to his or her post. Some other blogging/CMS platforms only support one or the other, but Graffiti (and Community Server) fully support both. After you add or update a post the plugin will scan the body for any links, retrieve the web page that each link points to, and check if the remote site supports trackbacks or pingbacks, and send one if they do. Adds a Comment RSS feed to display all comments for all posts in a single feed located at /feed/comments/. This is really useful when you want to follow all of the comments on a blog without having to check each post's web page every day. Can send a weblog update ping to services such as Ping-O-Matic, Technorati, Weblogs.com, and many more (the list is configurable). This is a way to let the various blog search services know that you have published or updated a post. Extends the core RSS feeds with GeoRSS support. GeoRSS is a simple way to encode a geographic location for each post in your feed. Some web sites and services look for this information to enable people to search for content written in or about specific locations. The plugin allows you to set a default location (where most of your posts are written at or about) and optionally override it for each post via an automatically created custom field. Each feature can be individually enabled or disabled. Jef Kazimer wrote a very detailed blog post about how to configure and enable the plugin. The Blog Extensions plugin requires Graffiti version 1.0.1 or above (Service Pack 1). While working on the plugin we realized that we needed add a few additional events and methods to the core to enable the plugin to do everything that we wanted it to do, which were included in the service pack. So it won't run on the original (v1.0) release of Graffiti. After the plugin was released to the integrated Graffiti marketplace, we decided to also make the Blog Extensions an open source project. This way interested community developers can contribute, and other developers who want to create plugins for Graffiti can look at the source as an example. Tagged as graffiti , plugins Similar Posts Now Graffiti Powered First Graffiti Update Delivers Tasty New Events Live Blogging the CSDC - Part 3 Posted Apr 12 2008, 08:47 PM by KevinHarder.com: Blog Filed under: Blog

• Source Code for Graffiti Silverlight Photo Gallery plugin released

  A few weeks ago I released a beta version of the Silverlight photo gallery plugin for Graffiti CMS that I have been working on, along with a blog post describing it. I wrote then that: Once they get tested a little more I'll make any needed changes and re-release it, along with the full source code... They are being released as a beta because I have not had time to fully test every combination of the options. Since then I have not received much in the way of feedback, so I'll be optimistic and assume everything works splendidly. I have not made any changes since that release either, although there are a few features I would like to add to future versions of the plugin (thumbnail support, reading EXIF info, improved config UI). Between working on the next version of Graffiti, other plugins and widgets, and of course the new baby, I know it will be slow going in adding those features in. So instead of just releasing a source code drop in a zip file as I usually do for my personal projects, I decided to create a Google Code project for this set of plugins. That way if there are other developers interested in improving the plugins they can do so with relative ease. I will keep the Slide.Show Photo Gallery Plugin download page on this site updated to point to the latest compiled and source code releases in the project. You can also use SVN (my source control system of choice) to grab the latest code from the project by following the instructions here. If/when you find bugs or have suggestions please use the Issues page in Google Code project. And, although it's probably overkill, I also setup a developer and news mailing list for the project that you can subscribe to if you are interested in participating or following future development. Even if you have no interest in a Silverlight photo gallery, the source code may be of educational interest if you are considering writing a complex Graffiti plugin. Tagged as graffiti , plugins , slide-show Similar Posts Add a Silverlight photo gallery to your Graffiti site Now Graffiti Powered New .Text to CS 2007 Blogs migration tool available Posted Apr 10 2008, 02:17 PM by KevinHarder.com: Blog Filed under: Blog

• Cadence is born

  My beautiful new daughter Cadence Danielle Harder was born this morning. She weighed 7 pounds and 10 ounces, and was 20 inches long. Megan did a fantastic job and both her and the baby are healthy and doing great. Photos from her first day can be found on my photo gallery page on this site, and on my Flickr account. I am taking the next two weeks on PTO/holiday. So please be warned that any work-related emails you send to me may have an even more delayed response than usual. Tagged as family Similar Posts Live Blogging the CSDC - Part 3 Add a Silverlight photo gallery to your Graffiti site Live Blogging the CSDC - Part 2 Posted Apr 02 2008, 10:05 PM by KevinHarder.com: Blog Filed under: Blog