Pligg CMS Blog

Whoopsie! We seemed to forget to include some database changes in the installation files for the Pligg CMS 1.1.3 release. This resulted in the vote feature not working for new 1.1.3 installations. If you are upgrading your website from a previous version of Pligg, you can safely ignore this message. If you have installed Pligg 1.1.3 for the first time on December 28, 2010 or earlier you should continue reading for a quick fix.

The good news is that a fix is built into Pligg CMS. If you haven’t deleted the installation files from your server yet, run /install/upgrade.php to initiate the upgrade process. If you removed the /install directory as we recommend, just re-upload that directory to your server and run the upgrade script to correct the voting problem. It only takes 2 seconds to fix the bug, but we will be re-packaging the 1.1.3 release with a fix tomorrow so that others won’t have to take these additional steps for Pligg to operate normally. You can expect an update message to be appended to this blog article once the 1.1.3 version has been updated to include this fix.

This past week we celebrated our 5th year of development. We are very proud to meet the half decade mark as one of the most popular open source content management systems. Over the past year in a half we have stepped up development and we are now supporting a couple full time positions at Pligg. This Christmas we would like to thank those who have donated their time or money towards the project. We are grateful to be in a position where we can continue building Pligg into a more powerful platform, and we couldn’t do it without the support of our users.

Today we announce the latest version of Pligg CMS, version 1.1.3. This version includes a few bug fixes, security updates, and a new and exciting voting method that makes use of the new Karma module. Karma has been a concept that has never been fully realized until this release. We are thrilled to finally provide Pligg users with a new way to encourage participation on your website through this new voting method.

Karma and Other Voting Methods

As of version 1.1.2, Pligg has 3 voting methods: the standard Digg voting method where users vote up articles, a Reddit style that allows users to vote up or down, and a 5 star rating system similar to many review websites. From first glance the new Karma voting method will function similarly to the Digg method, where users will be able to vote up an article. While the front end of this new Karma method will be identical to the Digg method and display the number of votes cast for the story, the back end will be calculating a karma score for the article. That karma score is calculated by adding up all of the karma scores from users who have voted on the article. The site will then publish stories that have reached a certain karma score, that value is set from the Admin Panel (default is 100 karma). If you don’t like that the karma score is hidden from view, you can always insert the new variable {$story_karma} in the link_summary.tpl template file to show the total karma score for a story.

Probably the easiest way to describe how Karma works is through an example. Let’s imagine that your site is set up to publish a story when it receives 100 karma points. A normal user will start off with 0 karma. Once they begin voting, commenting, and submitting stories their karma score will build up through use of the Karma Module. The module allows you to specify how many karma points each action should receive. In this example lets say that each vote gives the user +1 karma. So a user with 10 votes has a karma score of +10.

Now without complicating things too much, lets also consider that this user (let’s call him “Jack”) submitted a story. This story earned the user +20 karma, making the user’s combined karma score +30 at this point. That +30 score will be used whenever the user votes on a story. So let’s say that “Jill” submits a story and it sits on the Upcoming page. That story, without any current votes, will start off with a karma score of 0. Now Jack likes the article and decides to cast a vote on it. The story then jumps to +30 karma. This is not enough for the story to go published on this site, because the site requires a score of +100 karma to make it to the front page. Other members on the site will need to vote on the same story until the story receives +70 more karma, totaling +100. When that final vote comes in that equals or surpasses the +100 score for the story it will be pushed to the front page.

We realized that some users could become ridiculously powerful, so we added in one more option to try to take away a little power from these heavyweights. From the Admin > Configure > Voting page you can specify the number of “Votes to publish”. If you set this to just “1″, any user with a high enough amount of karma can publish stories with a single vote. If you set it to a higher number, this number reflects the minimum number of votes required for a story to go published.

Using the new Karma voting method stories may appear to have only a few votes, but the karma count for the story could be really high. Users who frequently participate become more powerful on your website when using this karma voting method, and they will have more control over what stories get published. This adds extra incentive for members to interact with the site.

New Features and Fixes in Version 1.1.3

There are a number of other changes applied to the 1.1.3 version of Pligg. Below is a brief list of updates followed by a list of template files that will need to be updated since version 1.1.2.

• Security improvements
• When you killspam a user, domains submitted by that user will be added to the local-antispam.txt file.
• Search field now requires 3 or more characters.
• Added select all option to Akismet management page, to make it easier to mass approve or delete suspect content.
• Fix for search terms that use an apostrophe
• Fix to hide friends area in profile when the friends feature is disabled
• Fix to hide sidebar top stories area when there are 0 results
• Updated robots.txt
• RSS for categories fixed
• Fixed broken story URLs from admin panel
• Fix to allow for non-latin character usernames
• Admin Snippet module can now import/export settings.

Template Updates

Red = Important Update
Orange = Small fix

1. pligg.tpl
2. link_summary.tpl
3. header.tpl
4. search_advanced.tpl
5. user_center.tpl

Download Pligg 1.1.3

Happy Thanksgiving everyone! This holiday season we will be celebrating our 5th year of development for Pligg CMS and we are excited about the amount of progress made over the past 18 months. Our previous release introduced some new features related to user Karma scores and a ranking system, and the next version of Pligg will make use of those Karma scores in a new voting method that is Karma weighted. More information on this update will be covered in a future blog article, but for now lets go over some equally exciting news… Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales!

This Friday (November 26, 2010), we will be celebrating Black Friday online through the Pligg Pro shop. We will be offering several of our latest and most popular items for sale at a reduced price between Black Friday and Cyber Monday. Prices will be reduced on select items Friday, and those prices will stick until Monday when we have our extended sale. On Monday some of the prices from Friday through Sunday will be re-adjusted to their normal prices, while other items will be decreased to a sale price for Monday only. Make sure to check out the sale starting on Friday and again on Monday. No coupon codes will be needed to receive some of the biggest discounts to date on some of the most popular items.

Just a reminder that the Pligg Widget design competition is still running. So far there are 9 free widgets found on the forum, I am hoping to commence voting for the best widget once we achieve 15 submissions. If you want to get your hands on an Amazon Kindle, or some other high tech gear, take a couple hours to design a Pligg Widget and you will be eligible to win!

We’ve noticed that spammers are creating Pligg accounts across multiple Pligg websites and they are using the user profile homepage field to insert links to spam websites. To help you fight this kind of spam we have added a small change to the Akismet module that will have it check user profile fields for spam and block suspicious profile changes. This update will be included in the next version of Pligg CMS, along with a few other features to help prevent this unwanted content from appearing on your domain.

For those of you who take pride in maintaining a spam-free website, we have a few tips for dealing with this profile spam so that you don’t have to wait for the next update. First we have prepared a couple simple commands that you can run from phpMyAdmin to check for spam URLs and clear out all user profile URLs altogether. The first snippet below will return a list of all members of your site who have a URL specified from their user profile area. This will allow you to quickly identify suspicious users and you could even remove them from the database entirely at the click of a button.

This next snippet will remove all user profile URLs from your website. I’ve run similar code on Pligg’s forums (vBulletin) to remove all signatures from user profiles. I had noticed a large number of spammer profiles who were inactive, but they still had signatures directing to bad websites. A simple cleaning removed all of those signatures and wiped the slate clean making it easier for me to maintain a spam-free website.

Today we are releasing version 1.1.2 of Pligg CMS. This update includes a number of bug fixes and general improvements to make Pligg CMS compatible with the latest version of the EVB module as well as the new Karma module. There has been at least one security fix applied to this version of Pligg, so it is highly advised that all users make the upgrade in an appropriate amount of time. The most recent security fix was pointed out to us by Mike from Sitewat.ch, who contacted us a few days ago about the potential exploit. We prepared a fix within a day and have decided to release this new version to make sure that this issue does not get exploited before members have a chance to patch their sites through the 1.1.2 update.

The Karma module will allow sites to update member karma values as users perform actions such as logging in, submitting stories, or adding a comment to an article. Previously karma was only being calculated when websites would manually set up a crontab on their web server, telling the server to crawl a karma update script every X number of hours. Now all of the updates are generated on the fly, making user karma counts up to date at all times and requiring no additional thought from the site administrator to set it up. Administrators will however have the option to manually configure karma values, by setting up how many points they want to give users for performing actions like submitting stories and comments, or voting on articles. More details about this module can be found on the Karma Module blog post.

Another new module that this release will accommodate is the External Vote Button (EVB) module. This new module allows you to embed voteboxes onto third party websites, like WordPress or Google’s Blogger blogs. This is a great new marketing tool for your site.

New Features and Fixes

For a non-condensed update information, you can read our SVN update logs.

1. Security fixes
2. New “User Ranking” system. Karma now determines a user’s rank. The more active a user is, the higher their rank.
3. Advanced search page now allows you to find posts by the date they were submitted on.
4. Support for the new EVB Module
5. Support for the new Karma Module. This release also includes the Karma module.
6. Failed login previously lost redirect data. Now it will remember your destination if you fail authentication.
7. Fixed Voting Method 2 (5 Star Rating) system.
8. Fix for searching for duplicate stories by URL
9. RSS fixes
10. Fixed HTML tags to allow feature
11. Spam trigger fixed
12. Fix to allow god level users to edit admin users
13. Fix for duplicate content (ex /category1/story-title and /category2/story-title show the same story). http://tinyurl.com/2vkenk8

The new External Vote Button Module for Pligg CMS makes marketing your Pligg site easier than ever. The module has been rewritten from scratch and is now based on JavaScript, CSS, and PHP code. The result is an EVB that is easy to customize, upgrade, and integrate with third-party websites.

I’ve prepared a video demonstrating the EVB module which you can view below. It’s a lengthy video, but it covers a lot of information. Many questions can also be answered by looking at a screenshot of the EVB settings panel. The module’s settings page has a lot of documentation that explains how to customize the module and examples on how to embed it.

As many of you know, the EVB module is currently being held hostage for a ransom of $200. So far we have made nearly half of that and I am hoping that we are on schedule to break $200 before the deadline. If we do not receive enough donations before the time is up the module will not be made freely available and we will list it in the Pligg Pro shop. If you would like to make sure that the module becomes public domain, please consider making a donation to Pligg CMS.

We’ve been driven to the brink of insanity, and we’re starting to take hostages! Our first victim is the External Vote Button (EVB), a module for Pligg that allows you to embed a JavaScript button on third party websites where members of your site can see how many votes an article from an external website has received and cast their own vote. The button is also used to speed up the submission process and makes submitting new stories to your site easier by automating part of the process.

We’ve taken this feature hostage because it’s been a while since our last donation drive, and we’re desperate for the money. So desperate that we might pull the trigger and kill this feature, or at least put it for sale in the Pligg Pro shop in the near future. If we don’t receive $200 worth of donations soon we’ll go bonkers and make this a premium-only feature. Don’t make us do it man!

Whatever you do, don’t call the cops! We don’t want this getting messy. Now hurry up and send us some cash in small unmarked Paypal credits.

If you haven’t noticed already, we are now using the External Vote Button on all of the Pligg.com blog posts. The button appears on the top left of all stories. If you are logged in to the Pligg Demo, you can vote on that article. More information regarding the new module will be coming out in the next few days. If you make a donation of $10 or more before October 29th while logged into a Pligg.com account you will receive the module for free.

Karma, the most mysterious feature built-in to Pligg, is finally getting some much needed attention from the Pligg developers. For years we have been talking about how we could improve karma, but it wasn’t until this week that we finally did something about it. Coming soon, to a Pligg version near you, is the Pligg Karma module. This module will allow you to finally keep your user Karma scores up to date without you having to set up a cron job. “What’s all this Karma jibber jabber?” some of you may be asking yourselves. Well read on and find out!

Karma is a score assigned to each user account on a Pligg site. The score is supposed to be a representation of how active the user is on your Pligg website. A user who is frequently participating on your site would have a high Karma score, while a user who is either new to the site or inactive will have a low score.

Previously the Karma feature required users to manually set up a cron job, which many users either didn’t have access to or they just weren’t informed that they needed to set one up. Another disadvantage to the old method is that the Karma scores would only be updated when that cron job was executed rather than in real time. Now that we have designed a new “Karma module”, there is no need for users to deal with setting up a cron job. When using the Karma module, Karma scores will be updated instantaneously as users vote, comment, or submit stories.

The Karma module has a settings page where you can configure how many points users earn (or lose) for a variety of actions. At the bottom of the page you are even able to artificially manipulate a user’s Karma score. This allows you to give some users an instant boost to their Karma. You can even punish bad users by giving them negative points in this field.

Sidenote: If you are currently using the /libs/karma.php script on a cron job you will need to disable the cron after upgrading to the next release if you want to use the new Karma module. You will also need to un-comment out that file at the top and bottom to enable it for use.

A new feature that we will introduce in the next version of Pligg will be a “User Rank” system. While Karma gives you a number that tallies user activity, User Rankings will show you what place a user has on the website. The most active user, who has the highest total Karma score, will be ranked in first place (#1). The second most active would be ranked as #2, and so on. The easiest way to see how rankings work is to look at the current Top Users page on the Pligg Demo.

User Ranks can appear on the top users, profile, and story pages. On story pages, you can display a user rank for the story author and also for every comment author. The “Wistie” template now displays User Ranks next to each of these areas as well as in the User Profile page.

In the past we had considered using these Karma scores to give users with high scores more weight to their votes. This would mean that very active users would have more influence over which stories would be moves from the upcoming section to the ‘published’ homepage. Digg.com uses a more complicated algorithm to give the top users incentive for submitting and voting on articles. At the time of writing this article we are still thinking about whether this type of feature is worth developing. If you would like to see this type of feature added to Pligg we would love to hear your thoughts, so leave a comment below.