Pligg CMS Blog

Want to show off your design skills and at the same time win some money? Have I got a contest for you! The Template Design Competition gives theme developers a chance to earn up to $300 for designing a Pligg template. Now’s a great time to try designing your first Pligg template, or for experienced developers to brush up on their skills. Users have until October 11 to submit a template, so get to work or tell a friend about the contest.

Prizes

First Place: $300 USD, to be paid through Paypal. Second Place: $100 USD, to be paid through Paypal. Third Place: $50 Pligg Pro gift certificate that can be used to purchase any item(s) from the Pligg Pro shop.

To show our appreciation to all those who contribute a unique and well designed template, we will be giving away a $20 Pligg Pro gift certificate to all qualified template authors.

Rules

To be clear about what we are looking for here is a list of rules, regulations and judgment criteria that will be used to determine the winner of this competition. See the bold items for the most important information.

• Open Source The source code for the template must not be encrypted and should be licensed under an appropriate open source license. You may license the work under the GPL license, MIT License, a Creative Commons variation, or similar so long as it allows for commercial use and modifications.
• Pligg 1.0.0 Compatible The template must be designed to work with Pligg 1.0.0 or above.
• Posting Your Template All templates should be uploaded to the Free Templates forum. Please start a new thread and attach the template files, a screenshot (when possible), and a description of your template. All new threads to that forum are currently being manually reviewed before appearing, so you may have to wait a few hours before others will see your template.
• Competition End This competition will end October 10, 2009 at 11:59 pm EST.
• You can re-use templates, CSS, Javascript, etc. from other sources as long as you comply with the source license. For example you can port a WordPress theme to Pligg as long as the WordPress theme is licensed to allow you to modify and re-purpose it.
• No copyright infringement. Please make sure that all elements strictly adhere to international copyright law. If you are struggling to find images to use try the Flickr Creative Commons search feature or open source image galleries like stock.xchng.
• Each template should include a link to Pligg.com. You may change the text used to link to Pligg, but we recommend using “Pligg CMS” or “Pligg Content Management System”.
• No advertisements should be contained in the template.
• Keep it kid-friendly and “safe for work”.

Judging Method

The top 3 sites will be selected by a simple general vote by the members of Pligg LLC. The second round of voting will consist of a point system to determine the quality, originality, and overall design. These three criteria will be equally weighed in the voting process and each will have a possible value of 10. A perfect template would result in a total score of 30.

The Fine Print

This contest will be judged by the employees of Pligg LLC and announced in a timely manner. Winners must be able to accept Paypal payments in order to receive their prize money. You must have a Pligg.com account to be eligible to win. Employees of Pligg LLC and hired freelancers hired by Pligg LLC are not eligible to be nominated for this contest. By submitting a template you are agreeing to license your work under an open source license as outlined in the post above. If you do not choose a license for your work, by submitting a template to Pligg.com you are allowing Pligg LLC to select an open source license on your behalf. Templates submitted after October 11, 2009 at 12:00 am EST will not be eligible for this contest. The rules, judging criteria, and other items from this blog entry may be adapted, edited or removed without notice.

I’ve created a new Pligg installation video to help guide new users through setting up Pligg. It’s a great way to see how easy it is to set up Pligg CMS and will hopefully make a few one-click-install users confident enough to attempt a manual install the next time they need to install Pligg. In this video I detail how to install Pligg on a PC using WAMP, which is a slightly different process from web host installs since there is no uploading or CHMODing involved. I walk through the installation steps and demonstrate how to edit the site settings and language phrases. I’ve updated the Wiki article “How to Install Pligg” and it now includes the latest instructions for installing Pligg along with the video below. More Pligg tutorials, demonstrations and preview videos will be released soon so check the Pligg Blog regularly for new content.

The 2009 Open Source CMS Awards recently started accepting nominations for this year’s awards. We can use your help to get Pligg CMS past the nomination stage, and all we are asking is for you to quickly cast your vote for Pligg in three categories. Just click on the three images below to be directed to the nomination pages and enter your name and email and submit your nomination. As a bonus this year’s awards are giving out a free iPod to a few lucky voters, so entering a nomination gives you a chance to win an 8GB iPod Touch. Once the nominations are complete they will begin a voting stage, once again offering 3 iPods to the voters of that phase so be sure to vote again if Pligg makes it to the next stage.

In order to fight spam on the forums I have reset all forum user’s signatures today. If you wish to reset your signature on the forums you can do so by adding one again through the forum user control panel. This one-time clearing of the signatures removed many older spam links that were inserted before we began requiring a minimum post count in order to have a signature. Since the post count rule did not apply to existing signatures when we implemented it, spam signatures have been sitting untouched for a couple of years. By wiping the slate clean on all signatures it only causes a slight nuisance for legitimate users, but completely destroys spammers. Forum signature spam is a big problem because it is difficult to continuously monitor over 43,000 user profile pages for inappropriate content. I apologize for the inconvenience caused by removing signatures, but it should be easy to update your signature. Before setting your new signature please review the forums signature rules that I’ve printed below:

1. Your signature may not contain more than 2 links and 1 of those links must be a Pligg-based website.
2. Your signature may not link to adult content of any sort. This includes any website that hosts adult affiliated content, whether that be imagery, language or other mediums.
3. Your signature must not be an eyesore. Please use normal size and color fonts so that your signature doesn’t distract from forum conversations.
4. You may promote items and services for sale in your signature provided that these items are directly related to Pligg CMS. For example a Pligg template for sale or design services for Pligg-based websites.
5. If your signature contains any elements that Pligg moderators dislike, we reserve the right to remove it or even ban your account. We take spam abuse and our own forum rules very seriously.

The Pligg CMS 1.0.1 update is now out and you can read the changelog on the official Pligg 1.0.1 forum thread. The biggest changes are to the 5 star voting method, since we wanted to use it on the new Pligg Design Gallery. 5 star voting will now display the user’s vote number on their voting history page rather than the average vote number displayed elsewhere. Users can also remove their votes (also known as unvoting) using the same unvote button used by the “Digg” voting method. There are also a number of fixes and smaller features added to this version of Pligg, so we recommend anyone running 1.0.0 to upgrade now. Update @ August 14, 7:00 PM EST: I’ve repackaged the 1.0.1 download because of a bug that broke the admin language editor. If you downloaded before 7:00 PM EST you should upload the new /libs/html1.php file to fix the problem. Thanks to forum member FnCool for the fix and billo for pointing out the problem.

I’ve noticed 2 new bugs today that will cause the 1.0.1 update to be pushed back at least until tomorrow. One bug is related to the 5 star voting method, and the second has to do with allowing admin users read and edit user profile fields. The 5 star voting method bug is somewhat critical since that voting method won’t work very well without fixing it, the other fix is much less critical but still important.

Tomorrow, August 13, 2009, we will be releasing an update for Pligg CMS and we will also be upgrading the Pligg Forums. Prior to the Pligg CMS release we will bring down the forums for about an hour. Once we have finished the upgrade process the Forums will be brought back online and we will release Pligg CMS 1.0.1. An extensive changelog will be published with the Pligg CMS 1.0.1 release thread that will detail the main changes since Pligg 1.0.0. An email will be sent out to forum members tomorrow after we have upgraded the site and prepared the next release.

After spending a while hosting our SVN with Beanstalk, we’ve decided to switch back to SourceForge. Even though SourceForge doesn’t offer some of the great features that Beanstalk offers, the Achilles’ heel of Beanstalk is that it doesn’t give unregistered users access to their great web interface for browsing files. The lack of this feature hurts open source projects like Pligg CMS and after a year of us waiting for them to add the feature we’ve given up on Beanstalk. SourceForge.net now offers a much improved user interface and more useful features since we originally left over a year ago. They also are a great source for attracting open source developers, which we are always on the lookout for. Now that we are back with Sourceforge you will see more updated figures and statistics provided by SourceForge, along with updated download packages hosted by SourceForge. Update your SVN information and point it to http://pligg.svn.sourceforge.net/ to get the latest Pligg Subversion repository. We have also updated our download counter script today to make it much more accurate. It now grabs real-time figures from several sites that host Pligg downloads. This update jumped our download counter up by about 1,500 downloads from what we had previously published.