Pligg CMS Blog

I hope everyone has already bought Pligg a gift for it’s first birthday, because if it doesn’t get a PS3 this year it’s going to be pissed.
Come join us Sunday, December 17th, 2006 for Pligg’s first birthday. We will be celebrating all day long on the forum and in the IRC room (irc.freenode.net/pligg) and we’re partying in a bit of an unusual way. Rather than expecting gifts from Pligg friends, we’re giving gifts out on Pligg’s birthday. To encourage users who don’t have a web hosting account yet we will be offering a one day coupon for $97 off hosting over at DreamHost.com. Use the coupon code “BIRTHDAY” on December 17th to get a web hosting package and a domain for just $22.40! On top of that we will be handing out prizes randomly to forum members and IRC visitors throughout the day. Hope to see you at the birthday celebration!

This was posted by Dravis on the forum and it deserved some attention because this is a fantastic mod that many people have requested. He provided an excellent writeup on how to install this mod, so make sure that you check it out if you want a way to improve your user participation. Below is Dravis’ explanation of what this modification is.

Users may add an Adsense ID and Adsense Channel (optional) to their account settings. If they set they’re Adsense ID, from that point forward, every time a story they posted is viewed, there’s a chance their ads are displayed. The optional Adsense Channel allows the user to track how many impressions and clicks their ads are getting through their Adsense account. You set the default revenue share percent for all users while implementing the mod, but after that, you may adjust any user’s revenue sharing percent through the user administration menu. So for example if you want to reward one particular member for their recent participation, you can bump just that one user’s revenue share from 50% to 80%. The way this mod is set up, there is no revenue sharing for ads on the front page summary, or any other pages on the site, just the full story pages where you can submit comments. As a safety precaution to protect your users, as long as they’re logged into their user account, they’ll never be shown their own ads in an attempt to help prevent them from accidentally clicking them and getting banned from Google.

I had a request today in the forum for instructions on how to backup MySQL data from a Dreamhost account. I do my best to support users who use Dreamhost because we make a few bucks from Dreamhost referrals and I use the service myself for some of my other sites. So I decided to put together a flash-video tutorial to help new Dreamhosters learn their way around the admin panel. This tutorial explains how to make backups of your MySQL database from Phpmyadmin and how to restore Dreamhost’s automatic restore points for MySQL.

View the tutorial here.

After the release of Beta 8 a couple weeks ago I came up with a new idea for helping Pligg get some money for future use. The idea was to start offering Pligg sites the ability to buy an advertising spot on the Pligg.com homepage. I didn’t want every site to jump on the wagon, so I created a few rules in order for a site to be accepted on to the front page advertisements. Each website must be currently using the Pligg code in some form, each website must use a customized template and will not accept sponsorship from adult-oriented sites, or sites affiliated with adult material. So far Pligg has nearly doubled our Pliggy bank and we recently broke the $1,000 mark for a short time. Soon after breaking the 1G mark we donated $60 to the designer responsible for submitting the template nicknamed “Paul” that is now included with the 8.2 release. Now the Pliggy bank hovers just below the one thousand mark eager to bubble over once again.

Some of you may have noticed the advertisements outside of the homepage because yesterday I decided to remove the text-link ads on Pligg’s forums that were running for a few weeks, and replace them with the Pligg site advertisements. I figured it was more important to feature fellow Pligg sites and give some good publicity to those who have been loyal rather than making a few cents each day on text-links. I also added an image for Dreamhost to the forum ads because I noticed that I recently had a spike in Dreamhost referrals that has made Pligg as much as $350 (if all goes well). I think this would be a good time to plug Pligg’s PLIGG25 coupon code for Dreamhost that gets you 25% off all orders under $400.

If you are interested in joining the Pligg advertising campaign that now spans across all of Pligg.com please read the Pligg Advertising thread on the forum and then contact me via pm or email through the forum. We have a limited amount of slots for advertisers, so it’s on a first-come-first-serve basis.

“Think of it as getting something back for your donation”

Advertising Rates:
– One Week front page rotation (7 days): $20
– One Month front page rotation (30 days): $60
– One 1/2 year front page rotation (6 months): $300
– One 1/2 year front page permanent (6 months): $380

Since today was the big release for Beta 8 and the unveiling of our new homepage, we decided to use the super-neato service provided by crazyegg.com to help us learn more about user browsin habbits on the forum and homepage for Pligg. CrazyEgg offers three viewing modes that overlay on your website. The first is an overlay that displays little plus icon buttons next to clicked links and color codes them appropriately to show how popular they are. The colors range from a dark blue to red (think cold –> hot). The second viewing mode is a list, which basically draws a table to show your links and clicks for each link. The final view is the heatmap, which is probably the neatest thing ever. Rather than explaining everything take a look at the following pics…

CrazyEgg limits accounts to 5,000 visits per month, and Pligg used all of those up in one afternoon. Fortunately we gathered enough information to help us determine the best placement for links and the data gave us a great perspective on what’s hot on the homepage and forum.

After testing two release canidates and months of waiting from the previous big release we have finally decided to present to the public our latest and greatest stable release of Pligg. Beta 8 has so many new features we really don’t even know how we can list them all, so for now we’re recommending that everyone give it a go on our demo site. Not only have we released a new version of Pligg, but we have also released a new Pligg homepage. The new homepage layout is much cleaner and structured to help maximize page space to make finding things easier. Another big move is our new way of serving you the latest files for Pligg. From now on you can get the latest stable version of Pligg from our sourceforge page. I figured that a giant “Download Now” image would be obvious enough to encourage new users to download and install Pligg without much hassle. The new homepage also features a “Featured Pligg Sites” section where we are displaying some of the best Pligg sites out there. The sites presented in this sidebar demonstrate the potential of Pligg and how it can be used in original and creative ways.

The last bit of news is related to the “featured Pligg Sites” area. We will soon be offering front page advertising for Pligg-only sites on Pligg.com for a small fee. The money that Pligg makes off of these front page advertisements will go into the Pliggy bank for future development projects. We will also consider giving free spots to those who have donated time and/or money to the Pligg project in the past. There will be requirements however in order for your site to be posted, but all of those rules will be discused in further detail later on. The basic rule is that the site being featured must be actively running Pligg and have a customized template. More on this later.

Enjoy Beta 8 everyone and get to work with the bug reporting. I have already discovered an error in the admin panel for installations on subdomains, but as of this moment it’s the only moderately big bug.

Since I have seen so many repeat posts in the forum I have decided to force users to agree to the new forum rules before posting. This applies even to those who have posted in the past including myself, and I wrote the damn thing. Lately there haven’t been too many repeat posts so I’m just taking steps to prevent the karma from going bad. There have been a lot of posters though who haven’t read the rules and they are reporting problems without giving us the necessary details to fix them. Please take a moment to read through the rules, even if you are a regular Pligg forum visitor, this will help better the whole Pligg experience.

1. If a post is written in any language other than English, it may be removed from the site.
2. Don’t spam/abuse any other member via e-mail or Private Messages. Spam of any sort will result in an immediate permanent ban.
3. Search the forum before starting a new thread. Be sure to also search the wiki, even though it is limited at this time.
4. Before starting a new thread please make sure that your permissions are correct by running /Smarty_Test.php. Your results should look something like this. This is often a problem with fresh installs.
5. If a solution can not be found from previous threads, please create a new thread.
6. In your thread please give us your Pligg version, template (version if available), your URL and any other information that might help detail your problem. BE SPECIFIC.
7. Please make sure that the info.php file is viewable on your site’s root. This will assist us in diagnosing problems.
8. Do not bump your own thread for at least 5 days. Be patient.
9. If you find a solution to your own problem, please post your solution to your thread to assist anyone else who might come across the same problem in the future.

In yet another case of “when trademarks go bad”, Digg has shutdown DiggGames.com for trademark infringement. This is yet another reminder to Pliggers to NOT use the word Digg anywhere in their domain or site. We have seen a similar move from when Digg.de (no longer around, but here’s a demo video) began redirecting links to Yigg.de. Yigg.de supposedly never came under any legal threat from Digg because Digg at the time had no trademark registered in Germany. Yigg has since changed much of their template to further itself from Digg and now sports a grey and orange template.

DiggGames.com’s trademark trouble is a bit of a surprise to me. The site is used only to promote games that are dugg on digg.com, but the style of the site is nothing like Digg. Not that you have to spell out your name and look like digg to get sued, but I would think that having no impact on digg.com would decrease your legal exposure. I remember an instance of a Chinese site using Pligg to create a Digg look-a-like in Chinese using I believe Digg.cn as their domain name, but that domain seems to no longer resolve. I have also seen several Pligg sites using the word “digg” in their domain, so this blog post is dedicated to the handful of you who might want to find yourselves a new domain name because Digg is on the lookout.

See the legal correspondence documents: Page 1, Page 2