Pligg CMS Blog

The other day I was curious to figure out how many downloads Pligg has had, or at least how many we were able to officially track. I ended up writing a PHP script to track the official Pligg downloads from the forums and to add in some old download data from Sourceforge. What saddens me is that I can’t track a lot of third-party sites out there and one-click installs provided by web hosts, so this number might be off by quite a bit. Some of you might find it interesting on how we are now tracking our downloads and how you can use our download count, so I’ll be documenting all of that on this post. First, let me explain how the stats work by giving you some example URLs that you can use to fetch download counts. The main url http://www.pligg.com/download_count.php gives you the total number of downloads that we are able to track. Now if you add some parameters to this URL you can get the stats for the average downloads per hour, week, day or year. Here’s an example of the day average url: http://www.pligg.com/download_count.php?stat=day. The numbers being generated here are updated a couple times an hour, so you won’t see the download count increasing with each page refresh. I bet your asking yourself how this number is being generated, well it’s a mix of hard-coded numbers and numbers that are continually being fetched from the vBulletin forum MySQL database. We used to use a downloads section of the site for hosting Pligg over a year ago, but since we switched that part of the site off the old versions of Pligg are no longer available. Since users can’t download them we know that the number for those versions isn’t going to change so we added up those numbers. Then we wrote a script that connects to the MySQL database and finds the download count for all of the working downloads from the Current Version forum. Then we add all of those numbers up into one figure representing Pligg.com downloads. I then hard coded some download figures provided by sourceforge.net and softpedia.com for some of our older versions and added them to the total figure. The end result of all of these numbers is our total download count. To generate an average daily count I wanted to discard a lot of the older download data since it wasn’t tracked very well and decided to only calculate the number of downloads from Pligg RC1 or newer. I took the total number of release candidate versions and then divided them by the number of days between the current date and the release date for RC1. The end result gives you an average daily download number (rounded to the nearest whole number) which the average hourly, monthly and yearly stats are based on.

<?php
$downloadcount = file_get_contents('http://www.pligg.com/download_count.php');
echo $downloadcount;
?>

Above is a quick example of how you could use PHP to grab the download number inside of a PHP script to display the number. We are using this method to display the Download Stats currently found at the top right of the Pligg Blog. If you are interested in the complete source code for this download counter script designed for vBulletin sites, please view the full article URL for the PHP source. Read the rest of this entry »

Those were the three questions posed by the artist Paul Gauguin in the title for one of his most famous paintings (seen below). Those questions have been coming up a lot in my mind recently as we prepare for our first official stable release of Pligg. We’ve been working on Pligg in some capacity for over three years now. It wasn’t until less than a year ago that Pligg became a full time job for myself, and since I took the new role Pligg has transformed from a PHP script to a full-fledged Content Management System. For those who are unfamiliar with the history behind Pligg here’s a brief summary of the past 3 years. We founded ourselves in December 2005 as a fork of the open source script provided by Meneame.net. Originally I had translated Meneame from Spanish to English and hosted a download, but quickly after that things started to take off because everyone back then wanted a Digg clone and Pligg was the first supported script to provide that. The next 3 years had plenty of bumps on the road, everyone contributing was doing it part time and a lot of personal issues including family and school distracted the developers from moving the project forward in a timely manner. As an open source project it was difficult to find much cause to continue to develop besides the satisfaction of building a great script that everyone wanted. Over time we were beginning to lose sight of what inspired us to start the project and it was at that time that we considered selling the site to a company who would be able to continue our work properly. While we knew at the time that Pligg could potentially become a profitable business, we hadn’t yet discovered the right formula for making Pligg a success both financially or as a CMS. That started to change though only a few months after we considered selling our assets when we came up with the idea of selling premium templates and modules through a digital shop. That in combination with site-wide advertising has been able to provide me with enough income to develop Pligg as my day (and often night) job for 9 months now. During that time things have changed a lot, and all for the better. What are we, now that I’ve committed to a full-time work schedule? I think Pligg has finally crossed that blurry line that divides PHP scripts from true content management systems. Now that we have jumped into the deep end of the pool where all of the other CMSs play it’s time for us to dunk some heads under the water and show why Pligg is a serious competitor. Soon we will be releasing our 1.0 Final version of Pligg, but don’t let the name fool you we will continue to be providing some smaller fixes for the foreseeable future. The 1.0 release marks the first release that we are confident that most of the bugs have been fixed and most importantly we won’t be making any more major changes to how templates or modules work. This is important because we want to future-proof templates and modules so that upgrading won’t be such a pain down the road. We’ve designed templates so that modules should be adding in new features automatically so that if anyone wants to add a feature to Pligg they shouldn’t need to modify any template files. I can hear the sighs of relief from the template designers already. Looking back over everything myself and the other developers have accomplished and even the mistakes that we’ve learned from over the years I’m very proud to be the founder. I would like to take this chance to thank everyone who has participated in developing Pligg, including any users who have either moved on to other projects or chose to participate in life instead of developing an open source script. I must also thank those who have made a financial contribution to Pligg. Over the years we have received a few very generous donations from members who expected nothing in return and the money gained from that has given us the ability to develop features that non-paying users benefit from. Pligg has become my life, I wake up every day to emails and forum posts and end each night with more of the same. What’s sad is that I really enjoy this lifestyle and being able to create something that other people are inspired by. It’s been a great opportunity and I have learned a great deal about web design, development and project management. If you are interested in becoming part of our content management development team, we always have spots open for talented PHP developers or template designers.

It’s been a week since our latest download, and we’ve noticed that many users have been having problems getting the previous version of Pligg to work without frequently displaying a “Wrong Referrer” message. It turns out that a security check that we added to Pligg wasn’t tested as much as we should have and it showed with RC3. That’s why we are packaging another release candidate version that fixes this problem and many others. You can get the latest version from the official release thread. We urge users to report whatever bugs you are finding to the forums so that we can fix the final gitches so that we can release a final 1.0 version of Pligg quickly. The donation drive is going really well and I thank everyone who has contributed to the project. Even if you want to contribute just to get the free module and template, we are happy to have your support. We continue the donation drive until a short time after 1.0 final is released, so if you will want to take advantage of the freebies that donors are getting you will need to contribute before the official drive ends.

Our last donation drive was held way back in February 2007, and during that one month period we gathered over $1,000 in donations from members. Luckily we were able to keep our costs for both running and developing Pligg relatively low for nearly 2 years and were able to have most of the costs of development paid for through other means of income.  Recently though our development costs have skyrocketed as we approach a final 1.0 version. In order to continue developing fixes for a large variety of servers and languages we have been spending a lot of money that we need to replace, that’s where the Pligg Donation Drive 2009 comes in. This year’s donation drive has a bit of a catch. This year we are offering something in return to our donors, and no it’s not a T-shirt or a mug. We are going to give away a brand new template and one of our most popular Pligg Pro modules to everyone who donates $20 to Pligg during this donation drive. As a special thanks to those who have donated to us in the past we will be offering the template and module for $10 to anyone who has donated $10 or more in the last year, just contact me ahead of time so that I can confirm that we have received a donation from you in the past. Donate $20 or more and we will be giving you access to both a brand new Pligg 1.0 template named “Magazeen” and one of the Pligg Pro shop’s most popular Pligg modules “Plingger“. Magazeen will not be sold in the Pligg Pro shop in the future, so this is a one time deal for people wanting to get a unique Pligg 1.0 template. If you want to see what Magazeen is like you can demo it on PliggMods.com, a new website that I am going to use to blog about Pligg hacks to add extra features to your Pligg site. Magazeen Template Features:

• Built in Jquery used for ajax effects including: image popups, login popup box, form input auto-resize. Test the effects out at pliggmods.com.
• Designed to compliment the new Upload module, which allows you to attach files and images to your stories
• Random Image sidebar widget (requires Upload module)

Instructions for Downloading Magazeen and Plingger Please make sure that you register on the Pligg forums before making a donation if you want to be credited and get access to the downloads. After you have logged into your forum account, navigate to the Pligg Donation Page and make a donation of $20 or more using Paypal. After your payment has been processed you will be marked as a “Donor” from your forum user profile. At that point you will see a new forum on the Pligg Forums homepage called “Donor Benefits”. In that forum you will find the downloads for Plingger and Magazeen. If you are unable to donate we ask that you take a few minutes out of your day to mention Pligg on your blog. It doesn’t have to be much and it doesn’t even have to be positive. We are glad to listen to your comments about what we could do to improve Pligg, we are also happy to listen to what you really love about Pligg. As long as you talk about us in a constructive way and send us a link we’re pretty happy. Money may help fund development, but publicity helps us too because it brings new visitors to pligg.com and hopefully that will mean more Pligg users. If you haven’t clicked on that donate link yet, take a moment and blog.

Our final version of the release candidate line for Pligg, Pligg 1.0.0 RC3, is available for download now. This version introduces a new admin category page (seen below) and a number of bug fixes including better support for Search Engine Optimized (SEO) URLs and foreign languages. We are only a couple weeks away from a final version of Pligg, which we expect will be picked up by a lot of web hosts and template providers.

The Bug Report forum has been closed to make room for the Projects section of the forum. Projects is a more advanced section that allows users to be much more specific about their bugs and allows us to assign developers to fix legitimate problems, and for other users to confirm that a bug actually exists. A lot of our time goes into figuring out if a problem that a user posts is caused by Pligg, their server or just something misconfigured. Most of the time it’s the latter, but when its a problem with Pligg we are usually quick to respond with a fix. This new policy to use the Projects section of the site will help speed up the process of finding legitimate bugs for us to patch. More information on what the Projects section of the site is capable of will probably come in a future post. If you have any questions about basic usage of Projects post it as a comment to this thread and I will try to address it on a follow-up blog article. The old threads and posts that existed on the Bug Report forum still exist if you access the old URL to a thread, so the information will continue to show up through search engine results for now. We will eventually completely remove the forum because once 1.0 final is out the archived threads will no longer be relevant or useful.

Transferring your site to a new webhost doesn’t have to be a pain, today I’m going to provide you with an easy to follow guide for backing up your website and changing webhosts.  This tutorial will guide you through using SSH, FTP, Pligg and phpMyAdmin methods for moving your data to a new server. These methods are not the only options for backing up your site, but they are some of the most commonly used and available methods. The tutorial seems long, but use the titles to skip sections that don’t apply to the method you choose for backing up your site. Before beginning let me quickly outline the two items that need to be saved when you want to backup your website. The first part is usually pretty obvious, the files on your server need to be saved to your computer and moved to another webhost. The second item is the data used to populate your site with stories, users, votes, settings and a variety of other information. This information is stored in a MySQL database on your web host and is kept separate from normal files. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been 20 days since the RC1 release and it’s about time we get the next version out. Pligg 1.0.0 RC2 offers a lot of bug fixes from our previous release and a few new features and modules. The upgrade process from the Beta series still hasn’t proved to be a flawless process yet, but we are going to continue working on it so that older Pligg sites can update to the latest version without any problems. We’re closing in on a stable 1.0.0 thanks to the many users helping out by reporting bugs.

• Many bug fixes to and improvements to make Pligg compatible with more web hosts
• Improvements to upgrade script
• IP Blocker module
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG module
• Social bookmark module
• Experimental Upload module for attaching files and images to articles. This product is still in an early beta stage.
• Delete Cache button from admin panel
• Made the language file easier to read and update

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