Upgrading to Graffiti 1.1 Worst Blog Upgrade Experience Ever

Thursday, July 03 2008

I just finished upgrading to Graffiti 1.1 which was probably the worst upgrade experience for a new version of a blog platform I’ve seen to-date. I came into using Graffiti from being a WordPress user. I was used to the easy upgrades WordPress offers. However this is not the case with Graffiti. To upgrade your blog with Graffiti you have to migrate your database which is a complete mess in itself – mainly due to poor documentation. The upgrade instructions make it look really easy and their announcement post didn’t include much (note someone had to leave a comment in their 1.1 release announcement post to include the upgrade instructions). Things go whacky when you are required to migrate your database. I read and re-read what I was suppose to do but simply could not get my database to “migrate” using the migration tool included with the Graffiti 1.1 release. Why the heck isn’t this automated in the backend where I go to some upgrade page where it updates my site for the new release? WordPress does this with their releases. After a few hours of troubleshooting, as you can see I am now back online. But several parts of my theme are borked and my RSS feed looks to be busted as well. To top things off my site runs like crap. Everything is extremely slow compared to the 1.01 was release I was running previously. The Control Panel is the most noticeable with performance degradation over the previous release. Blog posts seem to load slower etc. No, I’m not seeing a increase in traffic to my site either. I am hoping to resolve some of the outstanding issues with the site by tonight.

I’m frustrated because I’m not a very technical person. I never faced these issues with WordPress. When it tells me my database won’t migrate and throws a bunch of code at me it frustrates me because I have no idea (other than by trial and error) how to fix it. When my RSS feed simply stops working I have no idea what to do to make it work again.

I am comparing Graffiti with my experiences with WordPress because my hope is Graffiti will become the best ASP.NET blogging platform to go head-to-head with WordPress (which runs on PHP). I’m just not sure at this point if Graffiti will ever be that and from what I gather Graffiti’s primary focus isn’t really blogging anyway. Its really suppose to be a content management system for websites with blogging features. I’ve not gotten any indication from Telligent they want to focus on making Graffiti a excellent blogging platform and go head-to-head with WordPress. So I am now faced with the question of whether I should continue to stay with Graffiti at all? Will Graffiti be something for more technical ASP.NET folks to manage websites and content on websites rather than a worthy blogging platform competitor to the likes of WordPress? Will is remain something for the more technical folks versus how WordPress accommodates the lesser-technical peoples such as myself?

I apologize for the rant.

UPDATE: RSS seems to be working. Unfortunately it may cause dupes of posts to appear (it did for me in FeedDemon). At least it is working now. Also: I tweaked my theme and I believe I corrected some of the wonkiness.

Tags: telligent, graffiti, graffiti-1-1, update, upgrade, technical, code, rss, troubleshooting, problems, migration, database, asp-net, blogging