Open source GraffitiCMS and IIS6

Color me stupid, but then again I was under some emotional pressure at the time. The open source version of GraffitiCMS has some changes in it compared to the final official commercial release. Well, duh, I suppose; and of course I'd mentioned some of them in my previous blog post on the subject.

There's another change, one that bit me good and proper. My old friend Scott Bussinger alerted me to it pretty much straight away, but I wasn't able to properly diagnose the issue without internet access (my parents, where I was staying, do not have broadband). It seemed that, although I could post new blog entries and they would show up on the front page of the blog, the actual page for the blog post was missing, causing a 404. I fixed it at the time manually, that is, by adding the required folder and default.aspx file in it. I left it until I got home to properly debug the situation; after all, I wasn't posting that much, being away.

It turns out that Telligent were working on a new feature in GraffitiCMS to take advantage of ASP.NET routing, something that's pretty much only available in IIS7. The hint came from this discussion on CodePlex when Scott Watermasysk stated that Graffiti's routing support is enabled by default, whether the Graffiti instance is running on IIS7 or not. (He also states that "Routing support [in GraffitiCMS] should be considered alpha quality code as [it has] not yet been tested outside of the developers who added [it].")

Since I run this blog on IIS6 on GoDaddy, the solution was to turn this routing support off. In the new Configuration page of the Site Options admin section, there's an option labeled "Generate Folders for Posts/Categories/Tags (Legacy)". This should be checked.

Once it is checked (and Graffiti restarted), publishing a blog post will create the folders and default.aspx files as before.

That same discussion I mentioned above seems to indicate that the routine support does have problems even in IIS7. I've got a test site on IIS7 that I'm playing around with so I'll be investigating in my spare time.

  Loading links to posts on similar topics...