Pligg CMS Blog

A very long time ago, we announced a contest for Pligg Widget designers. The top 3 widget authors would win some awesome prizes including an Amazon Kindle, external hard drive, and thumb drive. Over time we forgot about the contest, but were recently reminded of it. Today we are happy to announce the winners.

In first place, and winner of an Amazon Kindle, is Sirwanme’s Last Logged In Users widget. This brilliant widget will display users who recently logged into your website. Not only does it show when they logged in, but Sirwanme went the extra mile and made it so that members who have registered in the last week show up in red. Hovering over each user’s last login time brings up even more details about the user including their email address, registration timestamp, and IP address.

The second place widget goes to Sansui’s Pligg Shortcut widget. While the first two tabs of this widget prove useful, it’s the third one that lets you send a message to all of your site’s members that I find to be most useful.

In third place is Lowster11 for his Alexagraph widget. This widget displays a graph from Alexa.com displaying your estimated traffic from the past several months. When installing this widget you will need to edit a line in one of the widget’s template files to define your domain, but it is still pretty simple to setup.

It’s our 6th birthday tomorrow (December 16th), and to celebrate our 6th year of development we are releasing the most powerful module ever developed for Pligg CMS for free! The Status Update Module was previously sold at Pligg Pro for $29.99, but now you can download it for free. All that you have to do is submit a tweet to Twitter by using a special landing page that we’ve designed. You will then be given immediate access to download the Status Update Module.

Click to view Status Update Module Screenshot

For a detailed description and screenshots of the Status Update Module, see the module’s official forum thread. The module will be included with the next release of Pligg CMS, but until then you can download it from this page.

Many, many months ago we announced a contest to encourage developers to contribute free widgets to the community. At the time of the contest announcement we never set a close date for the contest because we wanted to leave it open long enough to get several submissions. Over time we kind of forgot about it and have only had a few submissions, but we were recently reminded about the contest and are now setting an end date so that we can hand out prizes. Prizes for this contest include an Amazon Kindle, a USB hard drive, and a thumbdrive.

Submissions will be closed on the final day of 2011 and judged soon afterwards so that we can award the prizes. If you are considering entering the contest, please have your entry submitted to the free widgets forum no later than December 31st, 2011.

Now is the time to purchase the Pligg CMS add-ons that you have been thinking about because we are having the biggest sale week of the year. From Thanksgiving day (November 24th) through Monday the 28th we are offering some AMAZING deals at Pligg Pro. Not only are we slashing the prices on many items throughout the store, but we are also offering a coupon code that will save you an additional 20% off your next order.

Use the coupon code TURKEYWEEK when checking out to save an additional 20%. Remember that 20% of each sale goes towards developing the open source Pligg CMS project, so every purchase helps us continue to improve Pligg and bring new features to it.

Concerning the development of the next version of Pligg, we should start work in the 1.2.1 version over the holidays and have the next version out some time around the near year. There will be a number of bug fixes to address issues brought to our attention through user bug reports, as well as a major new feature that will be kept secret until the launch of 1.2.1.

A new version of Pligg CMS is now available for download. The 1.2.0 version of Pligg adds some important security updates, many bug fixes, optimized code, and a few new features. Some of the changes are listed below in an abbreviated changelog highlighting some of the most important updates. We highly recommend that you update your Pligg CMS website as soon as possible to avoid exploits from previous security holes that have now been patched.

1. Security fixes
2. Exclude disabled users from Top Users
3. Fixed the “Edit user data” admin feature
4. New weight parameter for modules, allowing modules to control what order they are called in.
5. Search groups by group name
6. The Tag Cloud page is now disabled when you have tags turned off site-wide
7. Human check (anti-spam) module fixes
8. Localized a few new phrases
9. Add feature to subtract a value of user score for removing a story vote
10. You can now use PHP in page content.
11. Left open HTML tags in the story content area will now be automatically closed.
12. Users can now select a site language file from their edit profile page. This will only change the Pligg language file, not the content being submitted to the site.

Looking for a free way to add a contact form to your Pligg website? This article provides instructions on how to add a contact form to your Pligg website in 3 easy steps. This contact form is based on one provided by 1stwebdesigner.com. It is a very basic contact form that can be tweaked to suit your own purposes.

Step 1

We will be utilizing Pligg’s page feature to create the contact page. Pages can be added by logging into the Pligg Admin Panel, then navigate to Manage > Pages > Submit a New Page. Set the page title, url, and other values to whatever you want. In the main content field, add the code below.

<form action="mail.php" method="POST">
<p>Name:</p> <input type="text" name="name" size="40">
<p>Email:</p> <input type="text" name="email" size="40">

<p>Concerning:</p>
<select name="type" size="1">
<option value="General Comment">General Comment</option>
<option value="Bug Report">Bug Report</option>
<option value="Advertising Inquiry">Advertising Inquiry</option>
</select>
<br />

<p>Message:</p><textarea name="message" rows="6" cols="50"></textarea><br />
<input type="submit" value="Send"><input type="reset" value="Clear">
</form>

Step 2

Next you should create a landing page that users will be directed to after they submit the contact form. Create a basic “Thank you” message on a new Pligg page. Copy down the URL to this new page because you will be using it in the next step.

Step 3

Create a new file and name it “mail.php”. Copy the data below into the new mail.php file, making changes to the recipient (what email receives the email) and header lines. The header URL should point to the “Thank you” page that you created on step 2.

<?php
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$type = $_POST['type'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$formcontent=" From: $name ($email)\n Type: $type \n Message: $message";
// Change to your email address
$recipient = "SAMPLE@SAMPLE.COM";
// The subject of the email being sent to you
$subject = "Contact Form";
$mailheader = "From: $email \r\n";
mail($recipient, $subject, $formcontent, $mailheader) or die("Error!");
// Point to the contact success page URL
header( 'Location: http://pligg.com/demo/page.php?page=contact-success' ) ;
?>

When you finish making the edits upload the mail.php file to the root of your Pligg website. All you have to do now is test the contact form to make sure that it works, and then post a link to the contact page by manually adding it to one of your template files. Congrats, you now have an email contact form on your website!

This week I am doing something very special with our Pligg Pro weekly deal. From now until July 22nd at 5:00 PM I am offering a module pack that includes every module that I (Yankidank) have created for Pligg Pro. I have put together this package as a benefit for my sister who went through cancer surgery this week. I will be donating all of this module package’s earnings to my sister’s family (Holly, Matt, Hannah, Graham, and Becca). In addition to that I will match the sales with my own money, doubling up to $1,000 and donating that portion to the CancerCare Foundation.

» Purchase the Module Pack Here «

This module pack includes 11 items, many of which are the best selling. Normally these modules would cost $208.89 to purchase them individually, but we are offering them for $89.99 as part of this 1 week deal. That’s about $8 per module!

The package includes the following modules: Facebook Module, Twitter Module, Tweet Module, External Vote Button, Status Update, Story Admin Email Moderation, vBulletin User Integration, Invision Power Board Integration, Registration Email Domain Check, Comment Subscription Module, and Save Drafts. For descriptions of all of these modules and links to their respective shop pages please visit the Breast Cancer Awareness Package page.

I thank everyone who makes a donation by purchasing this special package, and want to take a moment to remind women how important it is to check yourself regularly no matter what your age. My sister is only 31 years old and was diagnosed with stage-two breast cancer. She is the mother of 3 wonderful children, one of whom is celebrating his 5th birthday this week, and she appreciates all of the support she can get.

If you aren’t interested in this package deal, or want to donate another amount, we will also be contributing any donations made to Pligg this week as part of this benefit. Just submit a donation through the Pligg Donation page and set whatever amount you would care to contribute.

Have a Reddit.com account? Vote here to promote this article.

Most Pligg updates require that you make at least a few changes to template files to maintain compatibility with the latest version. These changes are typically new features and bug fixes that need to manually be added to the template with new versions. A common question that we get from users is how they can update their template when upgrading their site so that their template will remain compatible with the latest version of Pligg. This post will guide you through the template upgrade process and demonstrates how easy it is to keep your template up to date whenever a new version of Pligg comes out.

Step 1: Download Pligg CMS

The first step is to download 2 Pligg CMS versions: the version that you are currently running, and the version that you will be upgrading to. You can find archived versions of Pligg CMS in the Current Version area in the Pligg Forums.

When you finish downloading the 2 versions of Pligg, extract them into 2 separate directories. In the following examples I will be using the directory “Pligg CMS 1.1.5″ as the latest version of Pligg and the directory “Pligg CMS 1.1.4″ for the version of Pligg that I currently have installed.

Step 2: Download & Install Winmerge

Winmerge is software that allows you to compare 2 text files side by side. It will automatically scan a document for any differences and will highlight any of those differences. It also makes it easy to copy over changes from one document to another. Once you have downloaded and installed Winmerge software, continue on to step 3.

Step 3: Compare Old Version to New

Next you will open up Winmerge and select open. This can be done by pressing Ctrl+O, or by clicking on the icon that looks like a yellow folder. Winmerge allows you to compare entire directories, or just single files. We will now be comparing the Wistie template directory from the old version of Pligg to the latest version.

For the left input field, select the Wistie directory from the older version of Pligg. In the example in the screenshot I have selected Pligg 1.1.4. The right input field should select the Wistie directory from the latest version of Pligg, which in the screenshot is version 1.1.5. Make sure that you check the box “Include Subfolders” so that all of the sub-directories are being compared. Once that is set, click on the “OK” button.

You will see a list of all of the files contained within the Wistie directory at this point. We’re going to quickly filter out the files that haven’t been changed since the previous version to make this list more manageable. To do this, sort the results by clicking on the “Comparison result” column header. After this click on the first “Text files are identical” result, and then find the last result with the same “Text files are identical” label and Shift+Left Click on it to highlight all of those results. Right click and select “Hide Items” to remove them from your view. You will repeat this process with all of the “Binary files are identical” results too.

The list of files should now be only files that have changed since the previous release. If you see any “Left only” results in the “Comparison result” column, that means that a file has been added to the template since the previous version. If you see “Right only” results that means that a file has been removed.

The next step is to compare the old files to the new one. Double click on any of the file names on the list to open the file comparison tool. This will open up a new tab and open a split-pane view. In the left pane will be the old version of Pligg, while on the right side is the new version. You will see highlighted lines whenever Winmerge detects a difference between two lines. This could be as insignificant as text indentation, so in some cases you may be able to ignore some of the highlighted lines. When you see a greyed out line, that represents a line that is missing from one of the files.

Step 4: Apply Changes to Your Own Template

From here you will need to locate all of the changes made to the Pligg template files. Usually Winmerge will go the extra mile and even highlight in-line differences making it easy to spot exact changes. Whenever you find one of these changes you will need to apply that change to your own template. Obviously there will be some more minor changes applied to Wistie for cosmetic purposes, so not every change may be necessary to port over to your own template. It should be easy for you to determine which changes are non-cosmetic.

When adding the changes to your own template it may take a little bit of investigation if your template differs significantly from Wistie. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes for most users to perform the upgrade once they become comfortable with Winmerge. That’s about it for upgrading your template. Usually there are only a handful of changes applied to Wistie with each upgrade so it shouldn’t take you very long to update your template once you have familiarized yourself with this process and the Winmerge software.