Codeplex News & Articles

Microsoft has deployed an updated version of their open source code repository CodePlex. The latest updates include support for Windows Live ID and page ads.

For those of you who have followed the whole "is it dead or not" discussion on Telligent's Graffiti Web CMS, well there seems to be a final answer.

A very short announcement on the Telligent blog says that Graffiti has made the move to CodePlex as an open source solution.

Graffiti has a strong developer following, and we encourage those involved with Graffiti to continue to provide peer-to-peer support for one another. Users and developers can continue collaborating together to enhance the product. We look forward to seeing the innovation the open source community will bring to Graffiti.  We are especially thankful for some of the community members that stepped up and offered to help shepherd the project.

Hmmm, well this is all interesting. How many times did we ask Telligent what its plans were for Graffiti, only to be told that although there's nothing formal defined, Graffiti was still very much alive and well.

Now it's not that we expected Telligent to reveal all its plans before they were officially made, but many did see the writing on the wall -- if you go by the comments on our review of Graffiti.

Now licensed under the Microsoft Reciprocal License (Ms-RL), Graffiti v1.2 is available on CodePlex with some "extra" assemblies still on the Telligent website -- a website that needs to be cleaned up as it still talks about different license versions.

It is also interesting to note that Telligent's own website doesn't use Graffiti Web CMS, but instead uses CS Publisher, now called Scribus CMS.

Anyway, time to put this baby to bed. Happy downloading!

Microsoft has a secret, although it's not completely secret. They are getting ready to offer a new open source content management application code named Orchard.

The project, which will be discussed at next week's TechEd Europe, is a "new effort to produce free, open source, reusable components and a full-featured CMS application built on these components to produce a variety of different types of web sites."

It's hard to tell from the session description if this project is already well underway or just getting kicked off at the conference. The session includes an interactive discussion that allows developers to get "in on the ground floor".

ZDNet's Mary Joe Foley tried to get more details from Microsoft, but they remain mum on the subject, even ignoring the question of whether Orchard is just a new name for Oxite, the open source Web CMS Microsoft announced back in December last year.

As Foley suggests, the timing is just right for Orchard as it could become one of the first projects announced for the new CodePlex Foundation. The Foundation, which has been established to "enable the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities", has released the first working draft of its Project Acceptance and Operation Guidelines.

Microsoft is fairly good at keeping secrets, so we may just have to wait until November 11, when the TechEd Europe Session happens, to get all the details on Project Orchard. As soon as we get the goods, we'll pass them on to you.

We knew Microsoft was getting more accepting of open source, but allowing open source .Net Web CMS DotNetNuke reside within the walls of CodePlex wasn't something we thought we would see anytime soon.

Whether you have MOSS 2007 or WSS3.0, you have the ability to create a blog site for your company intranet, department, internet and so on. But the blogging site and capabilities that come out of the box with either version of SharePoint is less than stellar.

Now, however with the final release of the new Community Kit for SharePoint: Enhanced Blog Edition 2.0 (CKS:EBE) you actually have some blogging capabilities that provide a pretty advanced looking – and functioning – blog.