Hanalei, Hawaii Tuesday, February 09, 2010

SubSonic: New Project Site Online

I've spent the better part of this week moving our site over to Graffiti - a cool application from the Telligent guys that, at one time, was built using SubSonic :). We didn't support Access so they moved on :(, but we still love them, especially after getting Graffiti up and rolling so quickly.

Thursday, March 13, 2008

Our New Project Home
Our old site was my "dogfooding" of the SubSonic CMS application and it worked pretty well for a while. The one thing that bothered my was that I could never keep it current, with news and other things that I needed to get out to the community. Then it hit me:

Duh Haolie Boy Rob! Use a blog!

But I like the CMS aspect of our little app a lot. I know Wordpress allows for some CMS - but it's not quite what I need.... and then I met up with Scott Watermasysk from Telligent while at MIX and he put me in a Jersey "Soprano" headlock and I thought that I might just try this Graffiti thing...

Graffiti Rocks
I've been critical of some of the Telligent stuff before - I'll make no bones about that. It was classic over-design that resulted in textbook, whip-crack grooviness but shut down my server after a while (this is real early Communism Server :). I tried to figure it out, but it was one of those things where the UI bits were taking up most of my bandwidth (all of the ComponentArt stuff was just ridiculous) and TinyMCE kept munching up my code posts.

I rolled our forums back to Community Server a month or so ago and I couldn't have been happier - it's very fast and works great. And Graffiti is no different.

I am pretty amazed at the work these guys have done. Graffiti is fast - no really it's silly silly fast - simple, easy to use, and is incredibly simple to customize.

They use NVelocity's Chalk and have extended it a bit for their needs so you can build out some really cool themes, widgets, and plugins just like you would in Wordpress.

I rolled my own theme in about 4 hours (I'm not a designer) and it was really, really, no really! easy.

In fact it's very obvious that they used Wordpress as a design guide (all the way down to the name of the admin folder - "graffiti-admin" as opposed to "wp-admin"). And that's not a problem since it has the power of .NET and IIS behind it - I'll take that any day.

But they've improved on many aspects as well. The Navigation and Home Page features are really slick, as is the built-in flash dashboard reporting. Lots of things to gush about - go give it a try!

The very best part is that I can now use Windows Live Writer to create the docs and other things - this is HUGE.

Why Do You Care?
The main reason I hope you care is that we're trying to make our information as accessible as possible. This is done with RSS, easy URLs, tagging, and a great search engine.

I can also ask the more vocal SubSonic folks out there to push blog entries in - this to me is a major deal.

I'm very stoked so go have a look!

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adminjew - March 13, 2008 - Nice New Site Rob.

John S. - March 14, 2008 - Nice work! Is the RSS feed new? I saw it and couldn't believe I wasn't subscribed already.

Shawn Oster - March 14, 2008 - Lovely bit of kit there :) Funny enough I was just looking at Graffiti the other day and comparing it to the other ASP.NET CMS systems out there but then I got too lazy and waited until someone else did the grunt work and raved about it, especially since I know there is a price tag (for business use) for Graffiti. Nice to see someone else do the work :)

Mladen Mihajlovic - March 14, 2008 - Nice site, but I think you might want to make it resize a bit more. As is I get the horizontal scrollbar always unless I'm full screen on a widescreen monitor. I don't think that most people support that though.

Marco von Frieling - March 14, 2008 - Nice site, but it has one small problem :-( Have you ever clicked on the "Tips and Tricks" category? If you do it, some entries have web casts and they are - of course - loading and playing immediately, which sounds very funny if there is more than one web cast playing the same time. So you should edit the items that either the web casts are not shown on the list page but only on the item page itself, or they should not start playing (and maybe also downloading) automatically.

SoftMind - March 14, 2008 - Dear Mr. Rob, Currently we are exploring the great ORM's that will work with IronRuby in near future. ORM's currently popular are as follows.... (1) LINQ to SQL (2) Active Record (3) DataMapper. Mr. Ivan Porto Carrero is currently writing a book on IronRuby and shall focus more on great ORM's that will be supported by IronRuby. Since SubSonic is one of the most requested ORM with IronRuby in many threads, it would be nice, if you can throw some light on future plans of SubSonic Support with IronRuby. Since i do not want a proven ORM like Subsonic to miss a good coverage in the book, i request you to support us. You may visit the current thread on this topic here. http://www.ruby-forum.com/topic/145965#new Few lines from your side shall help us Thanks SoftMind

Rob Howard - March 14, 2008 - Hey Rob, I'm glad to hear you like Graffiti and that Community Server is working for you again too! You'll definitely see a lot of our experiences building Graffiti show up in Community Server going forward. With Graffiti we had the opportunity to try some new things - things that are sometimes hard to do in a product that has been out for a while :) Let me know if you have any problems! Thanks, Rob rhoward@telligent.com

Justin Etheredge - March 14, 2008 - Nice looking site, I might have to check Graffiti out.

dietrich - March 14, 2008 - Looks nice... Curious: how it compares to Drupal (which seems to be the hot open source CMS).

Gabriel Rodriguez - March 14, 2008 - I just gotta say thank you Rob and rest of the team for such a great tool. I guess you all feel great about accomplishing your goal of giving all developers that use subsonic more time for ourselves and the ability to develop more stuff in less time. Again, big Thank You.

nt - March 14, 2008 - Doesn't compare to Drupal. Drupal has so much more going for it than Graffiti. I make my livelihood in .NET. I spent a good several days researching web content management systems for my present company. Drupal came out the winner slightly ahead of Joomla. I just can't imagine anyone would buy Graffiti when it offers very little in features compared to Drupal and Joomla. Some will though. Drupal cost $0. If the argument is you might have to do custom development in .NET, then consider WSS 3.0 (hard to theme) or better yet SiteFinity by Telerik.

netter - March 15, 2008 - The site looks great Rob. I checked out Graffiti briefly for our site, but for some reason it dropped out of the running against some of the more established .NET CMS products. I may take another look. nt: You make your livelihood in .NET but your company is moving to Drupal? How did you manage that? We are researching content management systems also, but with a team of .NET developers, a very large site and an MS infrastructure, moving to Drupal would be a significant challenge and a tough sell.

A1730 - March 15, 2008 - I am having issues viewing the site with Firefox, especially when I need to watch a movie. The old site worked great. What could be wrong? Let's watch a movie... AT

Rob Conery - March 15, 2008 - @A1730 - You ever heard of a guy named Kralnor? I have no idea what you're telling me...

A1730 - March 16, 2008 - Rob, "ok, guys, how simple can you be? ITS A !&$%ING TOPIC ABOUT STAFF USERS, if your not a staff user, GET YOUR ASS OUT!!!!!!!! Jesus!!!!" Kralnor One of the most potent strengths of the old Subsonic project site was the ease with which I can watch the "training" movies using Firefox without any silverdark nonsense. Is it Graffitti's fault that I have to use IE to read the site? Why? Why?? http://subsonicproject.com/querying/ -- XML entity bleedings. I would like to read the site with Firefox if at all possible, or, I will be forced to buy a suite of security related programs just to surf the web with IE. Maybe it is worth it for SubSonic but I hate that silver light calls home and for this reason I will not install silver light. I won't be able to see any of your movies that uses "that" technology. The old tool for making the recordings for the subsonic project worked great! Bring it back!!

Rob Conery - March 16, 2008 - LOL so glad you know about Kralnor. One of the great memes of our time! OK - so you're still leaving me in the dark here. I made this theme myself, and I did it with FireFox and FireBug. It looks great for me (WOMM-certified and all) using FF 2.0. In terms of Silverlight - i used it for this last pres because I dig the Silverlight media player - and I don't need to lose bandwidth to the stream. Windows Live Streaming FTW! I've added a link above to grab the WMV... and thank you for the Kralnor laugh :)

A1730 - March 16, 2008 - Thanks Rob! You rock!! Secret admirer.

Tortilla Curtain - March 16, 2008 - Rob: Now that you work for Microsoft, are you still saying that Access is evil? I know that it still is in many ways, but the lack of an Access provider is the one thing that keeps me from using SubSonic. I can't convince people to switch, because we are consultants, and that means we get data from everywhere in many different forms. I can't leave Access, or I alienate clients that I need... Is there any possibility of an Access provider in the future? If not, how do I go about trying to make one and contribute it?

cowgaR - March 17, 2008 - Hi Rob, have you ever considered using Umbraco CMS? It is the "cleanest" and "clearest" ehm the purest CMS out there for .NET, which does, ehm...what CMS should do in the first place. Content Management, that's all ;) Ok maybe not a robust e-comerce there but many ppl are enjoying it not to mention it is free... not to mention it is free, and when I would need to pay for CMS it would be of course www.kentico.com, what else. I wonder you haven't heard of it yet.

Larry Klein - March 21, 2008 - Hi Rob, Was curious why you did not use dotnetnuke? LK