Pligg CMS Blog

We have created a new wiki article that we will begin using as our Official Roadmap. We realized that developers and users were being kept in the dark about some of our more specific plans for future releases, and that is why we are now detailing most of our upcoming fixes in this new Roadmap document.

If you plan on addressing one of the issues listed on the road map yourself, please edit the item on the list and color the text as blue so that we know someone is working on it. This will allow us to work on other items without overlapping development work. You will see other text colors in the document, and all of these colors are defined at the top of the Roadmap page.

Today I wrote a new Shell script that will add the latest SVN files to your server and prepare them for a Pligg installation. This new file allows me to perform very fast Pligg installs. In roughly 55 seconds I can transfer the SVN files to the server, rename the necessary files, CHMOD files and directories, run the Pligg installer, and log into the Admin Panel for the first time.

You can Download the pligg_files.sh Shell script here. It comes in two varieties. The first file (pligg_files.sh) will prompt you for a version from the console. You can enter in a version number that you want to use, for example “1.0.4″ would grab the stable 1.0.4 build of Pligg CMS. The second file (pligg_files_svn.sh) will get you the latest version of Pligg. This version will not be as stable as an official release, but may have some benefits such as new features or bug fixes since the previous major version.

Why use the SVN command?

By using the SVN command in SSH you are preparing your site for very simple core updates. Whenever a new SVN version of Pligg is released, updates are as easy as the SSH command “svn up”. Use that command when inside of your Pligg directory to update it to the latest SVN build.

We realize that some of the SVN builds are not meant to be used on most production sites. This is why we are now using SVN tags to mark official releases. Each time we release a new version of Pligg, we will be adding new tags to the SVN so that you can update to a specific stable build. Updating will be a simple 1 line command from SSH.

The example code above would update your pre-1.0.4 site to the 1.0.4 release using the SSH SVN command.

A bug caused by the new Admin News Management page has been fixed, causing us to re-release Pligg 1.0.4. The News Management page was changing the story status for multiple stories that were not meant to be changed whenever you would hit the “Apply Changes” button. This bug caused all of the articles that were marked as published on the News Management page to re-save their publish timestamp. Because Pligg uses this publish timestamp to sort stories on the homepage, it would cause problems with the sort order. Multiple stories had the same timestamp and Pligg didn’t know how to order them, so it would sometimes mix the publish order. This issue has been fixed by us writing code that tells Pligg to sort the published stories by publish date, and if publish timestamps match, sort those results by their submission date. This fix will correct the publish order on sites already effected by these incorrect publish timestamps. We have also applied a fix to the News Management page so that Pligg will only change the status for stories that move from one status to another when you hit the “Apply Changes” button. Another update included in the repackaged 1.0.4 build is the re-inclusion of the Akismet Anti-Spam module. We had removed Akismet from the default files because it wasn’t kept up to date, but after some time spent upgrading the module it is now working with Pligg 1.0.4. To apply these changes to your site just overwrite your previous 1.0.4 files with the new package and everything should work fine.

Sometime in the past 24 hours we passed the 300,000 download mark for Pligg CMS. This figure represents a great milestone in our success and we can’t wait to see how quickly we will get to the next hundred thousand downloads. Our previous release, Pligg CMS 1.0.3 racked up enough hits to earn the position as the most downloaded file on the Pligg.com. On another note we now have a vanity URL for Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/PliggCMS. You should also notice an increase in the number of posts being submitted to our Facebook fan page because we now integrate our Twitter status updates with Facebook. If you are using Pligg and you also have a Facebook account, please take a moment to add us as a favorite. And if you’re not already, also follow us on Twitter.

The 1.0.4 version of Pligg CMS is now out. You can download it and read the extensive changelog list from the 1.0.4 announcement thread. This version includes an improved admin panel, a better killspam feature, and a large number of new features and bug fixes. Another cause for celebration is that last week we passed the 50,000 member mark at Pligg.com. It’s great to see our community grow, and this major milestone means a lot to us. If you are using Pligg CMS for a project and you enjoy it, please take a moment to recommend it to a friend so that we can continue to grow.

This spring we are offering a massive 50% discount at Pligg Pro to celebrate our 4th year. For six days only you can receive 50% off by using the coupon code PLIGGSPRING when checking out. This deal only lasts until midnight Wednesday evening EST and is the absolute best deal we’ve ever offered. Sale starts Friday March 26th and ends on Wednesday March 31st, 2010. In addition to the store-wide 50% discount we will be rotating some great discounts on individual items throughout the sale, so keep coming back to Pligg Pro because these deals won’t last.

The Pligg Forums seem to be the only portion of Pligg.com that is still suffering from slow page load times. We will continue working on resolving this problem, but in the meantime we would like to share a minor bug fix to address a problem caused by the slowed Pligg.com server. Since the forums are still mostly inaccessible, the Pligg Module Management page may be taking a very long time to load for some people. To fix this we have added a timeout value to the module version check code so that if the Pligg server is inaccessible it will continue loading the page without the information. You can download the new admin_modules_center.tpl file here, which should be used to replace the file with the same name in /templates/admin/. Update: It seems like the server is back to normal speed. The forums are loading slower than normal for an occasional small amount of time. We will be upgrading the forum software in the next week to see if it will help fix this issue.

For the past week we have been experiencing some very serious problems with our web server. The server has locked up several times, causing all requests to timeout resulting in never-ending page load times. The only way for us to recover the locked up server is to have a technical support representative from our web hosting company reboot the system for us, which is not a speedy process. The delay caused by having someone else reboot the system whenever it locked up has slowed our progress on diagnosing and fixing the root cause of our server issue. Currently the Forums are the most affected by our server issues. They are mostly inaccessible at the moment, and we are working on addressing this issue as soon as possible. Throughout the day you may receive error messages or pages that never complete. We are doing our best to address these issues and we should have the site back to normal soon.