It started out well with Graffiti CMS, but it wasn’t long before it tarnished a bit. I noticed that my third post never appeared in my feed reader even though it was on the site.

Feed Error

At first I assumed that FeedBurner was just having some problems and didn’t worry about it. When it didn’t resolve itself, I started digging into it. At some point I disabled the FeedBurner settings in Graffiti so I could verify the original feed (Graffiti redirects requests to the normal feed URL to FeedBurner automatically). It was getting an error on every request for the feed (but no mention of it in the Graffiti logs)! After I enabled full error messages, I now saw this error when trying to view my feed:

I tried everything I could think of to clear this up myself – recycling the application on the server, uploading the code to the server again, disabling what few plugins I’d installed, and rebuilding the graffiti pages. I sent two emails to Telligent’s support and left a message on the Graffiti forums. I never got so much as an acknowledgement of the emails and no response from Telligent support on the forum. Given that I have no idea what could cause the error I was completely stuck. The feed had worked for a couple of days and then just wasn’t working any more. What good is a blog with no RSS feed???

Reinstallation

I finally gave up and completely reinstalled Graffiti from scratch the same way I’d installed it previously, including deleting everything and starting with an empty database. After reconfiguring everything and re-posting my previous blog entries, it’s all working including the RSS feed. Obviously something had gotten messed up in the data file and I’ll be sure to make backups regularly from now on.

Graffiti’s Future?

What concerns me most is wondering if I’ve chosen my platform poorly. While I like the feature set and flexibility and the price is reasonable, without support a closed source commercial product can be a risky proposition. So far I’m only using the free Express Edition for this personal blog, but I’d intended to purchase the full version and use it for more projects. Now I’m questioning the wisdom of that because of these factors:

• No response to support email – granted I haven’t paid for a copy yet, but I’d expect at least an acknowledgement of receiving my email. Other people have complained of the same sort of treatment.
• Little Telligent presence in the forums lately.
• The Graffiti blog is deathly silent with no postings for 4 months. Odd behavior for a company selling blogging software.
• The Graffiti Marketplace is a great idea, but hasn’t been fleshed out. There’s almost nothing available on it.
• There’s no Roadmap for where Graffiti is going (even though it’s been promised a few times).

Telligent is hosting a conference in a couple of weeks and perhaps we’ll hear some news about Graffiti coming from that. Unfortunately Graffiti is barely mentioned on the conference website. What do you think? Is Graffiti CMS still a good option?