Pligg CMS Blog

Pligg hit the 200,000 tracked downloads mark last week, with a download rate of about 500 downloads each day since Pligg 1.0.0 was released 8 days ago. To celebrate this mile marker I have developed and released a Pligg template that features the new ability to vote both UP and DOWN on stories. The template is called “The Standard” and it is a free 2 column template for Pligg. If you look under the hood of the template you will notice that it’s very much based on the default Pligg template “Wistie”. I performed many of the changes through editing the CSS file. I designed this template because I know that a lot of users don’t want to start designing a template from Wistie because it’s a 3 column template. It didn’t take much work to change Wistie to a 2 column template. From there I just added some images and adjusted the width of a few template files to match the new 2 column format. Hopefully this template will be used to generate some free 2 column templates that others can contribute to the Pligg Templates forum. The new template allows users to vote either up or down on stories, in some cases resulting in negative numbers appearing. A story still needs to reach a set positive number in order to become “published”, but once it is published it can go negative and remain on the homepage. The Standard will be included as a second template with the next release of Pligg, but we cannot guarantee long term support for it. You can learn more about the template by viewing the official The Standard template thread.

We’ve been busy over the past year and there’s a lot to show for it. The new version of Pligg is more stable, secure and feature packed and best of all it’s still FREE. We will continue to develop Pligg as usual, and starting with 1.0.0 we will be making fewer changes to template files (besides bug fixes) so that templates will continue to work as we release updates. We suggest that anyone running Beta 9.9.5 should upgrade to 1.0.0 to ensure that you are running the most secure version of Pligg. The most exciting feature for Pligg 1.0.0 is that we are now supporting 3 languages. During the installation process you will be able to select from English, German and Thai languages. By selecting one of these languages it will change the language of your entire Pligg site and admin panel. If you are interested in translating Pligg to another language please join the Pligg Translator Google Group.

We are spending some time over the next few days upgrading servers and transferring things over. During that time you may notice either a slowdown in page load times or even short periods of downtime. We may even lose a small amount of forum data during the changeover and I apologize ahead of time should we lose any of your posts during this transition. After the upgrade it would be appreciated if you would report any bugs that you might come across in the forums. I will write a follow up blog post with more information when I have something to share.

We are performing some final bug fixes and adding in one last feature before the big announcement. The last feature to be added in will be an altered vote method that will allow users to vote either up or down. Currently it’s possible to accomplish this through some clever templating, but the solution is more of a hacked patch than usable code. You can expect some new templates in Pligg Pro to take advantage of the new up/down vote method that will be added into Pligg soon. The release date for 1.0 Final will probably be Tuesday, June 16, 2009. I hoped to release mid next week, but I suddenly have to travel all of next week and I won’t be able to work my normal 12 hours a day. Unless something major happens between now and the 16th you can expect the 1.0 release to be out soon. Until then you can grab the latest SVN versions for the latest bug fixes and features. We will be ending the donation drive, and stop making the Magazeen template and Plingger module available for donors after 1.0 is out. If you want to get your hands on the Magazeen template or Plingger module you must have your donation of $20 or more in before 1.0 final is released. I suggest that you take advantage of the offer because Magazeen is really great template that I’ve put a lot of time into and it’s a great deal for just $20. Update: Pligg 1.0.0 is out now and can be downloaded from the forums. Release notes and a dedicated blog post will come soon. As you might expect we’re busy at work now.

I spent some time today upgrading our troubleshooter page, which can be found as one of the navigation tabs at the top of the installation and upgrade pages. Previously the troubleshooter had a limited number of checks that it would run on your site to test for common problems. Now the troubleshooter will detect all files and folders that need their CHMOD settings altered. I even caught a couple folders that I forgot to CHMOD myself when first running the new troubleshooter, darn avatars subfolders.

The page will also detect a few other problems such as PHP features that might not be turned on for your server, resulting in a broken Pligg. This will help you figure out if your server is compatible with Pligg, and even give you some instructions on fixing some problems. We aren’t asking for anything radical, just PHP 5 and MySQL 5 along with a few standard options like the GD Graphics Library and fopen. Even if you find your server setting off some red flags on the troubleshooter page your server will probably work. The red warnings only serve as a guideline for supported servers. You may find more errors on your server if it doesn’t come up all green.

There have been a number of spam emails being sent out from job board applicants over the past week so today I added ReCaptcha to the application form when applying to any job posts at www.pligg.com/employment. Now in order to post or apply to a job you must fill in a ReCaptcha field to prove that you are human. This will dramatically reduce the amount of spam content that has been appearing in employer inboxes and ensure that only legitimate providers are posting to the Pligg Open Source CMS Job Board.

We’ve released version 1.0 RC5 about a day and a half ago and we are using it as a temporary patch version until we release the final 1.0 version possibly in the next 10 days. There are a number of fixes from RC4 and a few new features, but most of those are changes made to improve SEO URLs and foreign language support.

RC5 Changelog:

• Many SEO updates and fixes
• Better foreign language support for UTF-8 Characters
• Future upgrades will automatically make edits to your language file so after 1.0 final you will never need to manually update it.
• Group admins can now be notified by email when a user requests to join a Private or Restricted group
• About page is now a “page”, editable from the Admin Pages section
• Related links now hides itself when no results are found
• Password reset now sends a more detailed email to users
• Google search method removed.
• ReCaptcha now better blends in to the Wistie template
• Multiple sidebar widgets were moved into modules

We are continuing to work on improving foreign language support and thanks to forum user Techkr who has contributed Thai translation files we are prepared to launch Pligg 1.0 with at least 1 language other than English. We hope that more translators will be contributing their languages to the Pligg translation project so that we can have several languages out soon after 1.0 is released.

This week we will be heavily testing the SEO functionality and the upgrade process from Beta 9.9.5 as we finish up with the 1.0 RC versions. I have spent the better part of the last 2 weeks testing a number of foreign languages to make sure that we covered everything from Arabic to Korean to make sure that a variety of characters will work across the board with Pligg. It looks like previous bugs that existed with the Admin Modify Language module and category URLs are now fixed so that any language that you throw at Pligg will work perfectly. Our latest SVN version (Revision 556) takes care of some URL Method 2 issues and cleaned up a few bad choices that we made in the past, or were just plain mistakes. Pagination is now working with the SEO URLs and there is very little left to fix at this point. A few more items to check off of the SEO URL todo list and we will be ready for primetime. The last item that needs tested is the reason why I’m writing this blog entry. It would be very helpful if some users could volunteer to test the upgrade process going from Beta 9.9.5 to the latest SVN revision (see the link above). It’s very difficult catching every bug and hiccup that occurs during an upgrade so the more input I get from others the better. I know that the template and language files are going to be the biggest pain for people upgrading. Users need to pay attention to the readme.html file included with Pligg so that they won’t miss some critical instructions. Wish me luck tomorrow as I start my week of upgrade testing and try to make Pligg polished for our 1.0 release.