Pligg CMS Blog

The Pligg Forums will be temporarily unavailable for scheduled maintenance for an unknown amount of time over the next week as we perform upgrades. If you encounter any error pages please disregard them until we post a follow up blog post announcing that we are finished with upgrades. Expect a big makeover for the forums, as we will be making a major upgrade in our forum software. This will probably require us to temporarily lose our custom template at least temporarily.

Today a guest in the IRC chatroom for Pligg (irc.freenode.net #pligg) ask if there was a way to create a landing page on his website to welcome first time visitors. Being the gracious coder that I am, I gave him a simple example that can be used to redirect newcomers to a welcome page. Add the code below to the top of your pligg.tpl template file to redirect users to a URL of your choosing (see code comments). I suggest creating a static HTML page with a welcome message or registration form.

{if $pagename eq 'index'}
	{php}
		if(!isset($_COOKIE['PliggWelcome'])){
			setcookie("PliggWelcome", "visited");
			// Change this line to point to your welcome page...
			echo '<meta http-equiv="REFRESH" content="0;url=http://pligg.com/demo/">';
			exit;
		}else{
			// echo "No cookie was found.. Continue loading page"; 
		}	
	{/php}
{/if}

Having trouble reading or copying the text above? Try this pastebin.com url.

This snippet of code works by checking if the person browsing the page has a specific cookie installed on their browser. If the cookie does not exist, it will add it and then redirect the user to another page. If the user does have the cookie, then the page will continue loading like normal. I haven’t personally tested this out on a Pligg myself, so let me know if you have any problems or comments.

A very long time ago, we announced a contest for Pligg Widget designers. The top 3 widget authors would win some awesome prizes including an Amazon Kindle, external hard drive, and thumb drive. Over time we forgot about the contest, but were recently reminded of it. Today we are happy to announce the winners.

In first place, and winner of an Amazon Kindle, is Sirwanme’s Last Logged In Users widget. This brilliant widget will display users who recently logged into your website. Not only does it show when they logged in, but Sirwanme went the extra mile and made it so that members who have registered in the last week show up in red. Hovering over each user’s last login time brings up even more details about the user including their email address, registration timestamp, and IP address.

The second place widget goes to Sansui’s Pligg Shortcut widget. While the first two tabs of this widget prove useful, it’s the third one that lets you send a message to all of your site’s members that I find to be most useful.

In third place is Lowster11 for his Alexagraph widget. This widget displays a graph from Alexa.com displaying your estimated traffic from the past several months. When installing this widget you will need to edit a line in one of the widget’s template files to define your domain, but it is still pretty simple to setup.

It’s our 6th birthday tomorrow (December 16th), and to celebrate our 6th year of development we are releasing the most powerful module ever developed for Pligg CMS for free! The Status Update Module was previously sold at Pligg Pro for $29.99, but now you can download it for free. All that you have to do is submit a tweet to Twitter by using a special landing page that we’ve designed. You will then be given immediate access to download the Status Update Module.

For a detailed description and screenshots of the Status Update Module, see the module’s official forum thread. The module will be included with the next release of Pligg CMS, but until then you can download it from this page.

Many, many months ago we announced a contest to encourage developers to contribute free widgets to the community. At the time of the contest announcement we never set a close date for the contest because we wanted to leave it open long enough to get several submissions. Over time we kind of forgot about it and have only had a few submissions, but we were recently reminded about the contest and are now setting an end date so that we can hand out prizes. Prizes for this contest include an Amazon Kindle, a USB hard drive, and a thumbdrive.

Submissions will be closed on the final day of 2011 and judged soon afterwards so that we can award the prizes. If you are considering entering the contest, please have your entry submitted to the free widgets forum no later than December 31st, 2011.

Now is the time to purchase the Pligg CMS add-ons that you have been thinking about because we are having the biggest sale week of the year. From Thanksgiving day (November 24th) through Monday the 28th we are offering some AMAZING deals at Pligg Pro. Not only are we slashing the prices on many items throughout the store, but we are also offering a coupon code that will save you an additional 20% off your next order.

Use the coupon code TURKEYWEEK when checking out to save an additional 20%. Remember that 20% of each sale goes towards developing the open source Pligg CMS project, so every purchase helps us continue to improve Pligg and bring new features to it.

Concerning the development of the next version of Pligg, we should start work in the 1.2.1 version over the holidays and have the next version out some time around the near year. There will be a number of bug fixes to address issues brought to our attention through user bug reports, as well as a major new feature that will be kept secret until the launch of 1.2.1.

A new version of Pligg CMS is now available for download. The 1.2.0 version of Pligg adds some important security updates, many bug fixes, optimized code, and a few new features. Some of the changes are listed below in an abbreviated changelog highlighting some of the most important updates. We highly recommend that you update your Pligg CMS website as soon as possible to avoid exploits from previous security holes that have now been patched.

1. Security fixes
2. Exclude disabled users from Top Users
3. Fixed the “Edit user data” admin feature
4. New weight parameter for modules, allowing modules to control what order they are called in.
5. Search groups by group name
6. The Tag Cloud page is now disabled when you have tags turned off site-wide
7. Human check (anti-spam) module fixes
8. Localized a few new phrases
9. Add feature to subtract a value of user score for removing a story vote
10. You can now use PHP in page content.
11. Left open HTML tags in the story content area will now be automatically closed.
12. Users can now select a site language file from their edit profile page. This will only change the Pligg language file, not the content being submitted to the site.

Looking for a free way to add a contact form to your Pligg website? This article provides instructions on how to add a contact form to your Pligg website in 3 easy steps. This contact form is based on one provided by 1stwebdesigner.com. It is a very basic contact form that can be tweaked to suit your own purposes.

Step 1

We will be utilizing Pligg’s page feature to create the contact page. Pages can be added by logging into the Pligg Admin Panel, then navigate to Manage > Pages > Submit a New Page. Set the page title, url, and other values to whatever you want. In the main content field, add the code below.

<form action="mail.php" method="POST">
<p>Name:</p> <input type="text" name="name" size="40">
<p>Email:</p> <input type="text" name="email" size="40">

<p>Concerning:</p>
<select name="type" size="1">
<option value="General Comment">General Comment</option>
<option value="Bug Report">Bug Report</option>
<option value="Advertising Inquiry">Advertising Inquiry</option>
</select>
<br />

<p>Message:</p><textarea name="message" rows="6" cols="50"></textarea><br />
<input type="submit" value="Send"><input type="reset" value="Clear">
</form>

Step 2

Next you should create a landing page that users will be directed to after they submit the contact form. Create a basic “Thank you” message on a new Pligg page. Copy down the URL to this new page because you will be using it in the next step.

Step 3

Create a new file and name it “mail.php”. Copy the data below into the new mail.php file, making changes to the recipient (what email receives the email) and header lines. The header URL should point to the “Thank you” page that you created on step 2.

<?php
$name = $_POST['name'];
$email = $_POST['email'];
$type = $_POST['type'];
$message = $_POST['message'];
$formcontent=" From: $name ($email)\n Type: $type \n Message: $message";
// Change to your email address
$recipient = "SAMPLE@SAMPLE.COM";
// The subject of the email being sent to you
$subject = "Contact Form";
$mailheader = "From: $email \r\n";
mail($recipient, $subject, $formcontent, $mailheader) or die("Error!");
// Point to the contact success page URL
header( 'Location: http://pligg.com/demo/page.php?page=contact-success' ) ;
?>

When you finish making the edits upload the mail.php file to the root of your Pligg website. All you have to do now is test the contact form to make sure that it works, and then post a link to the contact page by manually adding it to one of your template files. Congrats, you now have an email contact form on your website!