Pligg CMS Blog

I thought it would be nice to humor everyone for a moment with this system administrator song

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I have a secret to be told to only those reading the blog. There’s a secret page to help make each visit to Pligg’s forum much more organized. It’s the Pligg Home page. The page is pretty much a streamlined version of the forum that shows the most important items like the newest posts, private messages and hot topics. Some people might find this page useful if they check the site daily for updates most of the posts should fall into the Recent Threads area. If you plan on creating a lot of new threads rather than replying the regular old forum would best fit you.

Pligg Home

The original concept for the shape came from this post by Tagawa. My girlfriend and I then added to it (she did the work, I did the suggesting) and came up with a ribbon-like P. If anyone wants to improve on the logo you are more than welcome to it.

On today’s blog post I am going to go over why exactly Pligg came about and what exactly Pligg is all about. Many people ask me “why do you want to just copy digg.com”? I try to explain to them that I don’t want to copy Digg’s format and style, Digg is pretty good for what it is. Digg has been promising features and really doesn’t fulfill on many. The few times that you see something new appear on digg, it’s a minor and tiresome idea that really doesn’t add much to the site. Some of the simplest changes, like adding more categories and preventing mass spam, have been ignored by the admins. The video posted below is taken from a dignation video back in August of ’05. Many diggers were excited to hear of the possibility of a new “video” category where you could post video links. Unfortunately it was only speculation and nothing came of it.

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Digg has been lacking in new features, which will eventually come back to kick them in the ass if they don’t start listening to customer feedback. That’s why I believe in the Pligg project so much. Making the Pligg software open to the public to add to and improve upon not only will make the software more secure, but it will help us develop sites with plenty of user input and features. I encourage everyone who has experimented with Pligg software, through either installing it or visiting a site using it, to please give us suggestions on our forum. It’s our (non-paying) job to listen to what you have to say and do something about it. I don’t want Pligg to ever settle as being “good enough”, Pligg should always be striving to be better. It’s this need for constant need for improvement through user input that seperates us from Digg in the end.

A lot of Pliggers have been calling for some integration scripts to be written to share user information with existing web software. To help organize the future development of integrated Pligg versions and mods I have created a new “Integration” category containing 6 sub-forums. Three of the most popular forum scripts are at the top of the list, followed by two of my favorite Content Management Systems (CMS). The final sub-forum is “Other“, where you can suggest an additional sub-forum or just post any general questions about integration.

New Forums:

While I’m at it writing this post, I thought that I should mention that I have been sick all of this weekend and I haven’t had a moment to work on Pligg’s template. This means that Beta 6′s new template may be put off a bit longer. I am considering putting together a simple template for Beta 6 and making the bigger move to what I have been working on with the Beta 7 release.

If you are a Pligg user, please post your Pligg site in the new Pligg Directory located at http://www.pligg.com/links/. I have categorized the directory into 12 categories, but I’m sure there will be a few more added in the future. Here’s a list of the current categories:

If you have a request for an additional category please post it as a reply to this thread. Hopefully this new directory will be a good way to showcase who’s using Pligg and drive some traffic to site’s just starting up.

While reading through some random blogs today I came across a nice use of AJAX for finding .net and .com domain names. The tool provided by instantdomainsearch.com is a nifty way to find a .net or .com domain. While I was playing with the tool I noticed that pligg.net was registered about 10 days ago, Its fun to see that pligg is becoming a big enough word that people are buying pligg.domains. I’m very interested to see what pligg.org will turn into.

I was looking up what the alexa.com ranking for pligg.com was and I’m proud to say that we are pretty high up there for a site open for barely even a month. Currently pligg.com is ranked 139,063 (the lower the better), I expect that number to rapidly keep decreasing for the next few months as the project really starts to show it’s true colors. I must admit though that you should never rely on alexa.com for accurate site ratings. Alexa can and is cheated all the time and gets it’s numbers from users who have the alexa toolbar installed in their browser. This means that if you have a site with 200,000 unique visitors a month and none of them have the alexa toolbar installed, not a single one of them will be counted toward the alexa.com web ranking system.

I would appreciate if someone took this on and developed this as a side project:
I have been noticing quite a bit of spam already on pligg.com, one user particularly has been spamming stories a couple times a day and I’m really tired of setting the status of their stories as “discard”. We currently have no ability to completely remove a story from the database, which is a bummer because we can’t completely remove a story from the site yet. My plea for someone out there with php skills and some free time is for a method for physically removing a message from the database.

It is also necessary to start thinking about spam prevention and the ability to ban spammers. A spam system is something far off in the future probably for Pligg, but a simple ban solution should begin development soon. I think that we could have an effective ban system that will allow the admin to send a warning for minor problems and IP ban users who continually spam, flame or do anything dumb. If you have any suggestions or ideas about any of these three topics please leave a comment and I’ll try to address your comment in the future.