Liane

P.S. there are people who like hosting on Windows?

As for Graffiti, I don’t think they are targetting WP (and yea that would be a hard nut to crack) but they are hoping to use the lessons learned from watching WP grow and build a commercial product in a similar way. Graffiti isn’t marketed as a blogging engine but as a CMS. With that in mind, I also think we should start seeing wordpress marketed as a CMS and not just a blogging engine and I’d love some versioning and workflow in wordpress (something graffiti promises).

Anyway, I’m getting long winded and going nowhere, if you haven’t checked out graffiti since it’s release I recommend you do, it’s changed alot. As for a blogging platform, I’m still a wordpress (on windows) fanatic.

I work in tech support for a $3 billion company and there is one simple reason that corporations went the Microsoft way. It all started back with IBM’s decision to go with MS-DOS over DR-DOS and Microsoft not selling IBM the OS but licensing it for them to use. Since then, Microsoft has held OEMs hostage to their latest/greatest OS - you STILL can’t buy a no-OS system from an OEM, and that dates back to the MS-DOS coup.

As far as what we support - because we are a Microsoft shop, we use their tools. We don’t develop in Java or PHP because Microsoft throws in the DotNET development tools as a part of our licensing agreement with them for their Server OS, Workstation OS and applications. Management’s point of view is “we paid for it so we better use it”. So we DON’T use it because it’s better, we use it because it’s included in the licensing price. And while you can say that I am not a coder (I do my fair share of scripting for SMS) I see little difference in the result of the code.

Yes, companies don’t worry about the price tag as much as individuals do. Maybe they should. The computing horsepower necessary to run Windows Server/IIS/DotNET is ridiculous. You can run a LAMP server just as capable on half the horsepower. The computing horsepower necessary to load the Visual Studio for DotNET development tools is ridiculous. You quickly can develop PHP web apps on a computer that has half the horsepower.

Also your point about “the .NET which we all love” is kind of funny as nowhere on the site does it say that Graffiti is open source - you won’t be working with the DotNET code! You’ll have to learn a new templating language called “Chalk” to do any development, and isn’t that what you want to avoid? Learning a new language?

I don’t build 50 blogs a day and I don’t use AdSense (in fact, my blog has no ads on it at all) but I still “cry over $200″. I wish my company and my government did as well - it would mean a bigger profit sharing check and lower taxes for me.

I don’t think anyone using WP is going to say, “Hey - let’s buy Graffiti so we can host on Windows and learn .NET for a tool that is still in beta”. That would be ridiculous. However, there are tons of corporate developers out there who only code in .Net (myself included) who have no interest in learning another yet language (PHP) or hosting on a Linux platform. I already have websites in .NET on Windows servers. Why would I want to dump all my hard work just to use WP? Oh yeah - all my sites are already indexed in Google with the .aspx extension. I’m not going to lose all that link love by converting over to WP. So all these corporate guys are looking for a tool that they can use on their existing .Net sites that is better than the other crap out there. Yes, WP is much more stable and robust than anything available for .Net right now. But switching to Linux is never going to happen at this point. So we need something that let’s us live in the Windows world and still be a good, SEO friendly blogging platform. Whether Graffiti is that tool or not remains to be seen. But we definitely need something.

Re Graffiti comparing themselves to WP, I think this is done more from a marketing standpoint than an evangelical standpoint. It’s to tell the .Net guys, “Hey - everyone uses WP except for you b/c it sucks on Windows and you have to learn PHP to use it. So here is something just as good as WP and it’s built in .Net which we all love.” The sales pitch is to sell .Net guys on buying it. Not to convince WP guys to convert over.

Oh yeah - for people who worry about the price tag. Companies don’t work the same as guys who sit at home building websites hoping to make a few dollars off AdSense. If I tell my client that for $200 I can give him a stable blogging tool for his corporate site that doesn’t require me spending the next month building it myself, then the check gets written. $200 is nothing in the corporate world. Hell, I recently bought a .Net component just for the grid. It cost $700 and nobody blinked an eye. Corporations spends thousands of dollars for the IT Budget - that’s why they went with Windows/.NET in the first place.

If you’re building 50 blogs a day in hopes of making your first dollar on AdSense, then you are going to be crying over $200. But if you’re a real company with a real website, then this is nothing.

Graffiti CMS says it also supports “Microsoft SQL Server 2000, Microsoft SQL Server 2005, Microsoft SQL Server Express, VistaDB version 3.2, MySQL 5.0″…

As far as product support I just dont see that happening to often at all in the .Net world… The rally behind a product in the .Net realm is almost non-existent. There are a couple of open source blogging platforms in .Net and although they do have support they just have not caught on. SubText is a perfect example. I have been watching this project for a while now and development/release cycles are super slow despite it being an open source project on SourceForge. PHP and .Net communities are like apples and oranges…

My question is this: why would I want to leave something that is open source, stable, feature-rich, easily extensible, easy to use and community driven? If I want to change blogging/CMS platforms, I’ll go to b2 Evolution or Drupal or Nucleus or Serendipity or Geeklog or Joomla or Mambo or PHP-Nuke or PivotLog. I’ve used all of these is at least a testing environment. All are open source and community driven, just like WordPress.

Plus, if I’m a developer, why not use a language like PHP that is pretty much universal on the web? Why would I learn a proprietary language like Chalk in order to extend a proprietary product? Especially with all the alternatives that I’ve mentioned that all use the same language?

Overall I have tested a few .Net blog packages and this to me seems to be the better more complete choice for those who are looking for a quick download and install on a .Net platform.

Personally, I would be happy to spend several days installing and configuring a good piece of software that will serve me well for years to come than invest a single second in something proprietary that I will most likely have to abandon and migrate my data away from.

So it supports themes and URL rewrites. So does nearly every CMS out there. The question is: how many people will develop themes and plugins for it? Since this is not open source software, the answer is likely to be very very few. Need proof? Just look to Expression Engine. It’s a nice software solution, but has enjoyed very little in way of community contributions, meaning it will never be as rich and flexible as WordPress.