I’ve been working on moving a few of my websites to the Graffiti platform for a little while.  Migrating the old Bia Creations site from WordPress to Graffiti was straightforward and worked flawlessly.  By far, the most involved migration was this site, since there were a couple hundred posts that needed to imported from the Community Server database into the new Graffiti database.  One unfortunate side effect is that some of the later comments were not imported.

I ended up writing my own migrator because I had performance and connection issues with the one that ships with Graffiti.  I pruned out posts that I felt didn’t add much quality to the site and created a rather large redirect script to help ease the transition to the new urls.  If someone else is moving from Community Server to Graffiti and is interested in how I generated the isapi_rewrite rules for the redirects, I can share it.  It’s not pretty, but it worked great for me.

My experience so far has been extremely pleasant… I’m using commercial versions of Graffiti, so being able to use the integrated reporting is exciting to me.  Yeah, I’ve always had Google Analytics, but it’s nice to have the reporting built right into the admin section.  Overall, I’m happy with the themes for both this site and the Bia Creations site.  Graffiti makes it really easy to create a basic theme, which is more than I can say for Community Server 🙂

Other than that, as a compliment to the website upgrade, the web server got a nice upgrade as well.  The hardware was upgraded adding much needed redundancy and should provide a more stable environment for this website.  The OS was upgraded to Windows Server 2008 and Sql Server 2005.  MS did an excellent job with the latest server OS and I’m considering using it for a primary development environment instead of Vista.

Please let me know what you think and if you run into any issues.