Yes, it is released. You can read my review and story here.
Also there is a rumour that they will host another Theme Competition, this time $100 for every submission they like and $1000 for the grand prize (still a rumour though). Interested, Mic? 
Just received an email from Telligent that said:
We're excited that Graffiti CMS is on schedule to release this Friday.
But that means your time is limited to get your hands on a Graffiti license at the pre-release price, $99.
Remember . . . after Graffiti releases on Friday, February 15, the price will be $399.
So don't miss your last chance to get Graffiti for only $99!
Click here to take advantage of this great deal: http://graffiticms.com/get-it-now/
Thanks for your interest in Graffiti - and help spread the word!
The Telligent Graffiti Team
Yes, it's too good to be true but it's true. I just received an email from Paypal about this, click here to see more.
Yesterday I got an email from Scott Watermasysk with the download link to Graffiti CMS Beta 2 file as a response to my email regarding the pre-launched tester. I've downloaded it, installed it and now I'm playing with it.
Does it change much from Beta 1? Of course not. No big development can be done with only about a month (minus holidays for Christmas and New Year). And I think that Telligent will only focus on shipping Graffiti on time. But that's not stopping me from testing this Beta 2. Now let's see the enhancements (from my point of view of course).
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Back in 2007 I wrote about how to create Flickr Add-in for Community Server 2007 website. Now it's even easier to create a Flickr widget on graffiticms. First, you need to have an API key, click here to get it. It shouldn't take long to complete the request process. Once it completes, please write down your API key and Shared Secret key. Second, don't forget to thank Sam Judson for his great FlickrNet API Library.
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Over the last few weeks I've been trying to put my hands on LINQ but my other activities keep me away from learning this new feature in .NET. On this blog I want to show a simple master-detail using two gridviews and LinqDataSource control replacing the commonly-used SqlDataSource.
The <asp:LinqDataSource> control is an ASP.NET control that implements the DataSourceControl pattern introduced with ASP.NET 2.0. It is similar to the ObjectDataSource and SqlDataSource controls in that it can be used to declaratively bind other ASP.NET controls on a page to a datasource. Where it differs is that instead of binding directly to a database (like the SqlDataSource) or to a generic class (like the ObjectDataSource), the <asp:LinqDataSource> is designed to bind against a LINQ enabled data model.
One of the benefits of using the <asp:LinqDataSource> control is that it leverages the flexibility that LINQ based ORMs provide. You don't need to define custom query/insert/update/delete methods for the datasource to call - instead you can point the <asp:LinqDataSource> control at your data model, identify what entity table you want it to work against, and then bind any ASP.NET UI control against the <asp:LinqDataSource> and have them work with it.
Back to our goal (creating Master-Details list), first we have to define the data model that represent the database. To create the data model, click Add New Item option from VS2008 (I use VWD 2008 on this tutorial) and choose Linq to SQL File.
Selecting the "LINQ to SQL" item will launch the LINQ to SQL designer, and allow you to model classes that represent a relational database. It will also create a strongly-typed "DataContext" class that will have properties that represent each Table we modeled within the database. Below is the screenshot of an empty LINQ to SQL ORM designer surface.
The next step is creating the entity class from database. On my database explorer I have define a connection to CrashTest database on SQLEXPRESS on my machine. Using drag and drop function I put two tables Books and Comments to my designer surface.
Now that our data model is created, we can focus to our gridviews. Create a webform and put 2 gridviews to it. To bind our gridviews to the data model we created earlier, we can switch into design-view, select the GridView, and then select the "New Data Source..." option within the "Choose Data Source:" drop-down.
This will bring up a dialog box that lists the available datasource options to create. Select the new "LINQ" option in the dialog box and name the resulting <asp:linqdatasource> control we want to create.
The <asp:linqdatasource> designer will then display the available LINQ to SQL DataContext classes that our application can use.
Pick the CrashTestDataContext that we just created.
And then for the first GriedView (GridView1), choose Table Books and Select BookID, Books, and CommentsCount fields on the the Configure Data Selection part.
Choose Table Comments and Select CommentID, BookID, and Comments fields for the second GridView (GridView2).
In order to connect between the GridView1 and GridView2, one important key is set the DataKeyNames for GridView1 to BookID and GridView2 to CommentID. Second, add the where and whereparameter property to the <asp:LinqDataSource> to become like below:
Last step is to give GridView1 a Select CommandButton which will show us the related details grid (GridView2) when clicked.
Run the project on your browser and you can see a working master-details using LinqDataSource there.
Feel free to comment this post as I also still learning about new .NET features especially LINQ.
New year, a perfect time to move to something new. After some times reviewing and analyzing Graffiti (the new CMS from Telligent) I made up my mind and moved my blog at http://syuhada.com from CS to Graffiti. Yet I still think that Graffiti is need a lot of Improvements but I do also see that this application will be rock and very popular soon and the most important is Graffiti is so light and easy to use so it's more suitable for a single blog like http://syuhada.com than using a powerful but heavy Community Server.
The migration process itself wasn't so difficult. I used a migration tool provided by Jayme Davis and it works just fine. A CS MVP Keyvan Nayyeri also create a similar tool that works as windows application for this purpose, you can find it here. Please use these tools on your own risk as these tools are not officially provided by Telligent and also please re-check your URLs and Images on your posts as it might still redirect to a wrong (old) location.
To change the look, I took a free CSS template from Styleshout and ported it to Graffiti theme. You won't believe how easy to do it, it only took me about one hour to figure out and adapted it and you can see it working properly on my blog (although it's not perfect yet and I still working on it). I will post a download link when I finish with the tidying process.
In short term I think I'm gonna create some usefull widgets for my "new" blog and share it with others.
Finally, I want to say Happy New Year 2008, hope this year is better than last year.
Community Server is a great example of software that is built on top of the ASP.NET flexible membership services. The ASP.NET membership services enables their software to easily interoperate with other products that also use membership services, in this particular case SharePoint Server 2007.
I remember a while ago some folks in INDC talking about DNN vs SharePoint vs CS, and yesterday I found this article authored by Hans Hugli on MSDN. What a coincident!! I hope this link can be useful.
Rob Howard has announced on his blog that Graffiti CMS will be released on January 15. It will be offered in two licensing option, Express and Commercial.
Graffiti Express Edition, free
The Graffiti Express license is a free, non-commercial license that can be used by individuals. The Express Edition includes all the power of Graffiti with a few of the commercial features disabled and enables 3 2 (updated) user accounts. With the Express Edition you can build and run beautiful sites using all the capabilities of Graffiti.
The Graffiti Commercial license is currently $99 per unique domain. This version of Graffiti may be used by any person or organization to support, sell, or promote products or services. Graffiti is licensed per URL. The Commercial Edition adds:
Unlimited 10 (updated) user accounts
- Support for content publishing workflow
- Support for detailed content reports
Support for Microsoft SQL Server
See the price 
Hurry up, buy a license now otherwise you won't get Graffiti CMS with SQL Server enabled with cheap price because SQL Server Support only for Commercial Edition (If I'm not mistakenly interpret it). -- > They have changed it
I have bought mine a minute ago 
Graffiti is a lightweight CMS built by Telligent (popular by its well-known Community Server). I am very excited that I can view and test their latest product Graffiti with my own hands. My first impression of Graffiti wasn't that good, because I found out that the default database for Graffiti is MS Access (I believe and hope this is only for the Beta 1). Of course you can use MS SQL Server but you need to set the database manually and run some SQL Scripts to get the database running as it don't have the automatic installation as Community Server has. Again, I hope this database awkwardness will be fixed on the future release. The good thing is you only need to set your IIS and give appropriate access for ASPNET or NETWORK SERVICE account to your graffiti folder and you can view it live on your computer.
That's look nice, but I'm not too interested with the front-end display. What I'm interested more is how Telligenti (Telligent Team) create the management system behind it. Let see the administration panel. Currently there are 3 types of users, Administrator (admins can create and approve content as well as manage the rest of the site), Manager (managers can create and approve content but cannot manage any other part of the site), Contributor(contributors can create content and edit content, but all changes need to be approved by a Manager or Editor). I will only review what administrator can do as the other two types are only can do part of what administrator can do.
Right after you login, you will see a Google Analytics-like dashboard (from my point of view of course), but the graphs are using Adobe Flash and not Silverlight :p
Now let's move on to the Write tab, there is nothing special on this tab except that instead of using tiny_mce for the editor, now Telligent use their own editor called Telligent_Editor.
There is nothing special also on Post, Categories, and Comments tab as these tabs are standard for CMS application.
Moving to the Right Tabs, there are 4 + 1 menu can be found here.
The first one is the Site Options where we can set all the basic settings to the website, such as Title, Description, Email Setting, Meta Keywords, etc.
The second tab which is the most interesting tab is the Presentation tab. There are three subsections on this tab, they are Themes, Widgets, and Navigations.
Just like any other CMS, we can change the theme of our Graffiti website without any difficulty. But for you that interested to build custom theme for it, I guess it's a little bit tricky for now because Graffiti doesn't have engine like Chameleon on CS2007 (not yet?).
The other interesting part is Widgets. Graffiti comes with many built-in widgets that you can choose. You can put it either on the left or right pane and you can easily drag and drop the widget to rearrange them.
Just like arranging widgets, you can also use the drag and drop function when re-arranging the navigation links.
I don't see any specialty on the last two tabs (People and Reporting) except that (again) the graphics and charts are using Flash instead of Silverlight.
To close this review, I think that Graffiti is a very easy to use CMS system but to be honest I'm a little bit disappointed with this Beta 1 because the features of Graffiti is much the same as the other CMS system. I hope I can see a lot of improvements on the future release (I bet I will).
For you who want to see their roadmap for the Beta 2 you can find it here.