Pligg CMS Blog

It’s been 2 years since inception of Pligg and we wanted to bring everyone up to speed on where we’ve been and where we’re going. When Pligg began back on December 17, 2005 we never imagined how successful or complex the project would become. Pligg is now one of the most popular content management systems available today due to YOU, our wonderful users. Many articles have been written about Pligg, and Pligg has been mentioned (and even used) on many popular tech sites all over the web. The Pligg community forums have grown to over 17,000 members, all sharing ideas and supporting each other. Pligg is now offered by many web hosting companies as a packaged service. DreamHost is one of the largest web hosting companies in the world now offers Pligg through their “One Click Installs” Many people have requested to have custom modules developed. We wanted to provide a place in which everyone could have the opportunity to have access to these add-ons while still providing benefits to the authors. Thus the birth of the Pligg marketplace aptly named “Pligg Pro“. Pligg Pro allows you to purchase themes and additional modules to enhance your Pligg site even further. We launched “Pligg Pro” in the last week of October and has been an overwhelming success. It has allowed for Pligg to create a new revenue stream and has boosted development as we gear up to come out of beta and release Pligg V1.0. To celebrate Pligg’s second birthday we’re offering a coupon code for Pligg Pro that gives you 22% off all orders until 12/24/2007. Use coupon code ‘Birthday2′ when making your purchase. Visit http://pligg.com/pro/ soon before the coupon expires. Since our last release of Pligg Beta 9.8.2 we’ve been hard at work with bug fixes and code enhancements which will provide a noticeable difference in load times and code compliance. We’re quite sure you’ll be impressed, as this will clearly be the best version of Pligg yet. The next release, Beta 9.9.0, will be one of the last ‘beta’ releases before version 1.0. We’ve developed many new free modules that have expanded the abilities of Pligg. Anti-Spam modules that help reduce spam submissions and spam comments. A CAPTCHA module will allow you to choose from different CAPTCHAs or even use none at all. There is a new Template Manager module that allows templates to be installed with the click of a button instead of downloading, unzipping and uploading each file. Soon we will be launching a new service called “Fraxi” which will allow anyone to create their own free Pligg powered niche community with just a few clicks of a mouse button. For example if someone living in Miami wanted to create a social network for the citizens of their community, they will be able to create Miami.Fraxi.com in a matter of seconds. No hosting fees, no installation process and no time wasted. They can then concentrate on growing their social network instead of needing to learn the ropes of FTPing, monkeying with server configurations, setting up domains, etc. More information about this service and website will be unveiled soon. Future releases of Pligg will have a new installation process that will allow you to choose from various language packages. It will automatically download to your server the latest lang.conf file for the selected language. We’re asking for help from bilingual Pliggers to help translate these language files in the near future. We’ve developed an online system to try to make the process easier. You can participate as a translator by signing up soon via the Pligg forum. More details will be posted on both the blog and forum in the coming weeks. Since Pligg has grown rapidly we’ve needed to expand our server capacity a few times over the past 2 years to keep up with demand. Pligg.com receives roughly 5 million unique visitors and 20 to 30 million page views each year. This amount of traffic requires a massive amount of bandwidth and operating expenses. This is paid for by your kind donations and though sponsorships on the front page. If you would like to sponsor Pligg and have your company’s link and logo on the front page, we offer several extremely cost effective plans. So please show your support by becoming a Pligg sponsor today. You can find out more about Pligg Sponsorships by visiting here. If you’d like to make a donation you can do so by visiting here. We’d take a moment to applaud a site that has used Pligg in an original way. This time we tip our hats to the founders of www.RealEstateVoices.com, who have created a site with a unique look and feel that many visitors would not recognize as a typical Pligg site. Like many successful Pligg sites, they found a niche market and appealed to them through clean design and relevant content. Thanks for a great 2 years! 2008 will be even better. The Pligg Development Team

Yesterday we introduced a better way for users to request support for purchased templates and modules from the Pligg Pro shop. The Pligg Pro Helpdesk will help us diagnose and fix problems faster than the previous contact us forum that would only send me an email, which I would then forward to the appropriate person. Now when a problem is submitted to the helpdesk, any developer specializing in the selected category for the problem receives an email and can add a note to the support ticket and even close it. Most of the problems that have risen from shop sales are issues with users not having the proper PHP version on their server to run some of the modules. The module description pages list requirements, but users often ignore this data when making a purchase.

The title of this entry still has yet to be tested, but I think that I have finally solved a common issue with Pligg Pro downloadables. A handful of users were reporting corrupted zip files that they were unable to open. At first I thought that it was the compression software that I was using on my Mac to compress files, but after a user reported the same problem with a product that ChuckRoast packaged we figured out that it was an issue with the shop. The pligg.com server is based out of Texas where I believe that downloadable goods are taxed and we were thought we had a brilliant idea to get around this by putting the downloadable products on a separate server in California. I believe that this configuration was what was causing the products to become corrupted during the download phase for a few users. We now have gone back to serving the products from the pligg.com server and I am hoping this will fix the problem. If anyone continues to have issues with Pligg Pro downloads being corrupted please leave a message and I will address the problem as quickly as possible.

The Pligg Pro shop is the official spot to get Pligg Templates, Modules and Services. Many of the items in the shop are developed by the creators of Pligg, and a percentage of each sale goes toward further development of the Pligg Content Management System. In an effort to promote quality work on the Pligg Pro shop and to encourage the expansion of free downloads we require that all developers who sell work on Pligg Pro have donated modifications, modules or templates to the Pligg Forum. The Pligg Pro shop has been designed to give committed Pligg developers an incentive to keep developing. All items submitted to Pligg Pro will be reviewed based upon the developers standing in the Pligg community and by the quality of the work. Pligg Pro also will work to negotiate fair and honest prices for the shop. If you are interested in becoming a developer, please contact us using our developer signup form.

In need of a new domain or web hosting account? GoDaddy has provided Pligg with a few coupon codes to save Pliggers money next time they make a purchase on GoDaddy.com. This will benefit me personally because I buy domains like a kid at a candy store. Make sure the next time you make a GoDaddy purchase you apply one of these codes to save some money. And sorry you can’t stack these coupon codes for maximum discounts, only one per order.

Visit GoDaddy.com Now to Buy a Domain or Web Hosting

Clicking on any of the coupon images or the link above will automatically apply 10% OFF your next order, even if you don’t use a coupon code. Please share these coupon codes with your friends to support Pligg CMS, and to get them a great deal on a domain.

Like these promo codes? Check out our web hosting coupon code page for more great deals. Featuring Dreamhost, Arvixe, Bluehost and many more popular web host providers.

In an effort to reduce spam posts we have installed the vBulletin module “Spambuster” on the Pligg forum. The plugin automatically detects spam based on a point system that checks keywords from users who haven’t posted much. Any posts that it thinks might be spam are automatically turned invisible and a thread is created for moderators to review the post and deal with it appropriately. In the past we have been getting cell phone advertisements almost daily, but it looks like the new spam detection program will prevent that from ever happening again. In case you are a relatively new forum user and you find that your posts aren’t showing up after submitting them, please take into consideration that this may be because it used words that our spam protection program might have flagged. If you find yourself in this situation please give a few hours for one of the Pligg forum moderators to check and approve your post.

I spent some time this evening going over what was causing problems with donors not being credited automatically like they did months ago. After looking into the problem I quickly realized that I had made a big mistake that had gone unnoticed for months. At some point I had installed two separate Paypal donation plugins for vBulletin and somehow never noticed. I didn’t realize until tonight that the plugins were separate and thus the features of the two are not combined, so I had to choose one plugin over the other. I chose to go with the more simple plugin, which is visually less attractive and has fewer features than the other. The donation process will now operate correctly and add your username to the list of donors and automatically move you into the ad-free usergroup for the forum. Sorry to previous donors who will not be credited on the donor list, there is no easy way of importing the data into this plugin. Previous donors will however still be moved into the ad-free usergroup, but this will have to be done manually by me. If you have donated $10 or more in the past, please send a private message to Yankidank and I will take care of moving you into the correct usergroup ASAP.

There have been some issues with the Pligg donation page automatically crediting donors, so until I figure out a solution I will have to manually add donors to the list so that they no longer see ads. If you have donated using the same email address that you used to register for the Pligg forum you should be credited by the end of the day. If you used another email address, please send Yankidank a PM on the forum with the email you used to donate. Hopefully this issue can be resolved sometime in the next week, but I don’t have an easy way to test the donor status at this moment without actually donating.