Kevin Harder

Enhance your Graffiti powered blog

Graffiti Blog Extensions Plugin 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

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