Pligg CMS Blog

This week I am doing something very special with our Pligg Pro weekly deal. From now until July 22nd at 5:00 PM I am offering a module pack that includes every module that I (Yankidank) have created for Pligg Pro. I have put together this package as a benefit for my sister who went through cancer surgery this week. I will be donating all of this module package’s earnings to my sister’s family (Holly, Matt, Hannah, Graham, and Becca). In addition to that I will match the sales with my own money, doubling up to $1,000 and donating that portion to the CancerCare Foundation.

This module pack includes 11 items, many of which are the best selling. Normally these modules would cost $208.89 to purchase them individually, but we are offering them for $89.99 as part of this 1 week deal. That’s about $8 per module!

The package includes the following modules: Facebook Module, Twitter Module, Tweet Module, External Vote Button, Status Update, Story Admin Email Moderation, vBulletin User Integration, Invision Power Board Integration, Registration Email Domain Check, Comment Subscription Module, and Save Drafts. For descriptions of all of these modules and links to their respective shop pages please visit the Breast Cancer Awareness Package page.

I thank everyone who makes a donation by purchasing this special package, and want to take a moment to remind women how important it is to check yourself regularly no matter what your age. My sister is only 31 years old and was diagnosed with stage-two breast cancer. She is the mother of 3 wonderful children, one of whom is celebrating his 5th birthday this week, and she appreciates all of the support she can get.

If you aren’t interested in this package deal, or want to donate another amount, we will also be contributing any donations made to Pligg this week as part of this benefit. Just submit a donation through the Pligg Donation page and set whatever amount you would care to contribute.

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Most Pligg updates require that you make at least a few changes to template files to maintain compatibility with the latest version. These changes are typically new features and bug fixes that need to manually be added to the template with new versions. A common question that we get from users is how they can update their template when upgrading their site so that their template will remain compatible with the latest version of Pligg. This post will guide you through the template upgrade process and demonstrates how easy it is to keep your template up to date whenever a new version of Pligg comes out.

Step 1: Download Pligg CMS

The first step is to download 2 Pligg CMS versions: the version that you are currently running, and the version that you will be upgrading to. You can find archived versions of Pligg CMS in the Current Version area in the Pligg Forums.

When you finish downloading the 2 versions of Pligg, extract them into 2 separate directories. In the following examples I will be using the directory “Pligg CMS 1.1.5″ as the latest version of Pligg and the directory “Pligg CMS 1.1.4″ for the version of Pligg that I currently have installed.

Step 2: Download & Install Winmerge

Winmerge is software that allows you to compare 2 text files side by side. It will automatically scan a document for any differences and will highlight any of those differences. It also makes it easy to copy over changes from one document to another. Once you have downloaded and installed Winmerge software, continue on to step 3.

Step 3: Compare Old Version to New

Next you will open up Winmerge and select open. This can be done by pressing Ctrl+O, or by clicking on the icon that looks like a yellow folder. Winmerge allows you to compare entire directories, or just single files. We will now be comparing the Wistie template directory from the old version of Pligg to the latest version.

For the left input field, select the Wistie directory from the older version of Pligg. In the example in the screenshot I have selected Pligg 1.1.4. The right input field should select the Wistie directory from the latest version of Pligg, which in the screenshot is version 1.1.5. Make sure that you check the box “Include Subfolders” so that all of the sub-directories are being compared. Once that is set, click on the “OK” button.

You will see a list of all of the files contained within the Wistie directory at this point. We’re going to quickly filter out the files that haven’t been changed since the previous version to make this list more manageable. To do this, sort the results by clicking on the “Comparison result” column header. After this click on the first “Text files are identical” result, and then find the last result with the same “Text files are identical” label and Shift+Left Click on it to highlight all of those results. Right click and select “Hide Items” to remove them from your view. You will repeat this process with all of the “Binary files are identical” results too.

The list of files should now be only files that have changed since the previous release. If you see any “Left only” results in the “Comparison result” column, that means that a file has been added to the template since the previous version. If you see “Right only” results that means that a file has been removed.

The next step is to compare the old files to the new one. Double click on any of the file names on the list to open the file comparison tool. This will open up a new tab and open a split-pane view. In the left pane will be the old version of Pligg, while on the right side is the new version. You will see highlighted lines whenever Winmerge detects a difference between two lines. This could be as insignificant as text indentation, so in some cases you may be able to ignore some of the highlighted lines. When you see a greyed out line, that represents a line that is missing from one of the files.

Step 4: Apply Changes to Your Own Template

From here you will need to locate all of the changes made to the Pligg template files. Usually Winmerge will go the extra mile and even highlight in-line differences making it easy to spot exact changes. Whenever you find one of these changes you will need to apply that change to your own template. Obviously there will be some more minor changes applied to Wistie for cosmetic purposes, so not every change may be necessary to port over to your own template. It should be easy for you to determine which changes are non-cosmetic.

When adding the changes to your own template it may take a little bit of investigation if your template differs significantly from Wistie. It shouldn’t take more than 15 minutes for most users to perform the upgrade once they become comfortable with Winmerge. That’s about it for upgrading your template. Usually there are only a handful of changes applied to Wistie with each upgrade so it shouldn’t take you very long to update your template once you have familiarized yourself with this process and the Winmerge software.

Starting today we will be offering weekly deal for one item at Pligg Pro. Starting each Friday at 5pm EST, we will feature a product that will be on sale for 25% off for 7 days. Keep an eye on the countdown clock so that you don’t miss out on a sale before it expires. This week’s deal is the Karma Wrangler module, which is on sale for $13.50.

If you aren’t familiar with our banner ads, they are the the 234px by 60px image banners that appear across all of Pligg.com. Pligg receives roughly 250,00 pageviews each month . The average visitor to Pligg.com spends 2 minutes and 28 seconds browsing, viewing about 3 pages in that time. Pligg.com targets highly technical users, many of which are involved in web development and web design projects.

Tonight we have made a significant change to the Pligg Pro shop. Fellow developer Chuckroast and I (Yankidank) came to a decision that the number of hours that we were spending fixing user errors was becoming a problem. Many people purchasing modules were not reading the provided support documents or viewing videos that we provide on the product pages that demonstrate setting up and configuring modules or templates. Too many support tickets were being added and it was no longer economical for us to spend so much time working on these unnecessary support tickets.

That’s what lead us to a brilliant idea. We have decided to no longer offer support as part of the Pligg Pro product package. Instead we will be offering an installation service as an add-on for most products. On the product page you will see a checkbox for “Installation”. When you check this box, it will add $10 to your order and a Pligg developer will handle the installation and basic configuration of your product. This will eliminate any possibility for user error, and helps compensate the developer for their time.

If you choose to use the Pligg developer installation option, you will need to fill in all of the fields on your Pligg Pro Account page so that we will have access to your FTP and Pligg login credentials. Make sure to do this shortly after placing an order so that we can install the products as quickly as possible. Once we have your order and login credentials we should have the product installed in less than 2 business days (usually on the same day).

Because we are no longer offering support as a service included with your product purchase, we have significantly discounted the prices on nearly every item in the shop. You will see prices 10-20% lower than their previous cost. This makes items even more affordable for those who are willing to install an item on their own.

How will this affect purchases placed before March 23, 2011?

Anyone who placed an order prior to March 23 will be qualified for the previous support methods. We stand by our original pledge to give you support for free if you ordered items before this policy change.

Pligg Content Management System 1.1.4 is out now, and we urge you to upgrade as soon as possible. This release patches a number of security issues brought to our attention by a couple different third party sources. These updates are critical to keep your site secure and will make you less vulnerable to certain types of attacks.

It’s not all security updates though for this release. We have also added a new anti-spam module titled “Human Check”. Its job is to make life harder on spambots by using an array of honeypot fields and randomized field names. The module will operate on both comment and story submissions.

Another new feature added to Pligg CMS is live story previews. You can now condense the submission process to a single page and users can see an Ajax preview of their story displayed as they fill in the submission fields. Check it out at http://pligg.com/demo/

Other good news about this release is that the upgrade process is pretty simple. The only complicated template edits are contained in the submission template files to accommodate the new live story preview feature. The few other files that have been updated are pretty minor and shouldn’t take long to apply to your own templates.

While diagnosing possible causes for a Pligg site running slower than I would like, I came up with some SQL queries to perform some spring cleaning on a Pligg database. The following 3 queries will remove stories and comments flagged as spam, then remove inactive members who haven’t interacted with the site by submitting content or casting votes. I don’t suggest that everyone use these methods to clean up their database. Pligg doesn’t discard spammer data from your database by default so that the spammers can’t just register again on your site. We maintain their user information (email, username, IP address) so that we can use that information to block them. I have had requests in the past for a way to completely remove these users from the database for the purpose of shrinking the database size. The first query we are going to run will remove all stories flagged as spam. Start by navigating to phpMyAdmin’s SQL tab and then submit the following code:

DELETE FROM pligg_links
WHERE link_status = 'spam'

Next we will remove comments marked as spam from the database. We are running this and the previous query before the third one so that spammers will show up as inactive users in the third step. Once again, run this code from the SQL tab in phpMyAdmin.

DELETE FROM pligg_comments
WHERE comment_status = 'spam'

Finally, we will remove all inactive users from the website. An inactive member is one who does not have any stories, comments, or votes registered in the system. Sometimes we will refer to these members as “zombie” users.

DELETE FROM pligg_users
WHERE pligg_users.user_id NOT
IN (
SELECT link_author
FROM pligg_links
)
AND pligg_users.user_id NOT
IN (
SELECT comment_user_id
FROM pligg_comments
)
AND pligg_users.user_id NOT
IN (
SELECT vote_user_id
FROM pligg_votes
)
AND pligg_users.user_level <>'god' 
AND pligg_users.user_level <>'admin' 

This year we thought that we would show our love and appreciation to our users by offering everyone a 20% OFF coupon code to celebrate Valentine’s Day. Use the coupon code VALENTINES2011 during checkout at Pligg Pro to receive this discount on orders of $20 or more. The coupon code expires February 15, 2011, so make sure that you place your order before Valentine’s Day is over!

The Pro Shop is now integrated with the Pligg Forums! If you already have a forum account, then sign in to Pligg Pro using those credentials. If you have a pre-existing account with Pligg Pro you should continue using your previous Pro credentials. The checkout process has also been overhauled over the past month and is now much easier to use, so check it out!