Hi Guys,
Happy New Year!
Great job on the beta, I've been using it for a week now, and things are generally quite positive, much less difficulty than my CMS 2.x experience! (But then, I was on quite a learning curve in 2006).
I may be repeating some of what others have posted, I've browsed 80% of all posts in these forums, but will reinforce what I, as a user and developer find important.
- I liked the example about the yoga teacher as a small business exemplar. Even though Scott W. seemed to downplay those criteria, I found them very compelling from a marketing standpoint. And yes, I know Graffiti can't be all things, but you may find unlikely uses coming out it as it develops, and that equal more business for Telligent.
- not sure why the Meta Keywords are set to so small number of characters. Is that a Google-Yahoo delimiter? I like to have more keywords on my homepage, and I know we can tweak them page by page, but would still like more on some pages.
- I need to delete categories to get rid of clutter. I know it's coming, not soon enough...
- I'd like to see 40+ themes minimum, like CMS, for v.1.0. The current three really prevent me from doing any serious development of content right now, since I want to settle on a theme, and tweak the overall design from there. I am doing backend work with content in the meantime.
- speaking of which, the WYSIWYG editor baffles me, what am I missing? Why can't I change font type and size? Why can't I center, left-right align? Is there a basic and extended switch I'm missing? The same goes for LiveWriter. What's up here? Also, the spell-checker tab is redundant since it calls IeSpell and it's already installed in my MS Explorer 7.x. When I click it, I get a link to download the zipfile and no actual spell checking, which again, is already installed on my browser. It seems redundant.
- RE: current themes. Has anyone printed out pages? They look like crap. I see there are no print.css sheets yet. Is this common at this stage? I want WYSIWYG printouts or close to it.
- I can upload images, but where's the audio, video, flash, shockwave, etc.?
- I'm glad you allowed Google Analytics in the main page, but would like all themes, or most, have Google Adsense placeholders. I know we can use the plain text widget, but do consider making it more standard and easier to use.
- RE: Access, please, please keep it in the specs. VistaDB is a new product and will take years for webhosts to integrate. Access is already rolled out and working, for example, I'm using a shared host on Server Intellect to host my CMS site AND my Graffiti site. It worked right out of the box. All I have to do is copy the DB from the server to back up my site. THAT'S wonderful. I have to request a backup of my SQL 2005 DB, and that takes time and tickets, etc. So I implore you to keep Access compatibility, since things seem to be running so smoothly for beta testing. Also, I got an initial error about medium trust and certain picture uploads that didn't work, but a call to Tech Support changed the trust level to HIGH and that works just fine. Again, Access = easy = happy developers like me who can go under to hood, but not to any great depth with databases.
- is there a way to import, not mirror, but import a CMS 2.x blog into Graffiti?
- on the login screen, the "Remember Me" checkbox doesn't work in MS Explorer 7.x. Not sure why, as it works on CMS 2.1. So I keep timing out due to inactivity when I'm working on something else and have to relogin constantly.
- RE: folders in root. Occam's Razor gentlemen. Keep root lean and mean. Make an Uncategorized folder, and post the skillion folders there. I want to develop a content rich site. So I want 100s, possibly 1000s of pages in time as things develop in the 3-5 year view of my new site. I don't want to see 1000s of folders in my root dir, ever.
- I'd like to request a widget for a random quote generator while wishes are still fishes. I have an ASP link working, but have to hard-code the skin, and that defeats the whole design purpose.
- I continue to get a path error and I'm not sure why, again, I'm running on a Server Intellect shared host account ($40/month), and loaded Graffiti into root. Here's the error msg.:
UploadFileManager
An error occured while deleting an expired upload context.
Reason: Could not find a part of the path 'c:\inetpub\wwwroot\my-site.com\wwwroot\files\uploads'.
- the docs need proofreading, many have grammatical errors, as though their author is not a native English writer. Clean them up asap, they reflect your business, and send a very sloppy message in the mean time. Not what I have come to expect from Telligent.
Finally, all things considered you're doing a great job and I'm pleased with the general direction this product it taking, keep up the great work!
Paul H.