Pligg CMS Blog

We have been fortunate that 1.0.3 has proven to be a fairly stable and bug free release, and because of that we have not posted a follow up version as quickly as we have done in the past. Last night I took some time to consider what features Pligg needs most, resulting in a roadmap for our next two releases. The first item on the list is to get a 1.0.4 version out that will contain some smaller fixes since the 1.0.3 release, as well as some feature improvements. One such feature that will be improved is the Admin Management pages, including the story, user and comment management pages. The interface for these pages is a little perplexing and could be improved through some small changes. Another item that has already been applied to the SVN version of Pligg is the way that Pligg treats users who have been reported for spamming. If you marked a user as a spammer through the “killspam” feature it will now change their user level to “Spammer”, resulting in them disappearing from the top users page and hiding them from the admin user management page. The same user management page has also been enhanced to allow you to sort users by their user level. Some people question why we don’t completely remove spam accounts from Pligg CMS, and the reason for that is that by deleting the account they can sign up with the same username, email and IP information. Once these changes have been made and all reported bugs from 1.0.3 have been fixed we will release a 1.0.4 version. The release to follow 1.0.4 will be a 1.1.0 version that will contain some major changes to the Pligg Admin Panel. The Admin Panel homepage will be rewritten and will feature a widget-based area where you will be able to configure what information you want to see when you log into the Admin area. Some example widgets that you might see are a latest 10 submissions, latest 10 comments, and site statistics widgets. The new Admin Panel Homepage will function similarly to iGoogle. We are excited to see what modules people will come up with to take advantage of this new Admin Homepage. The next Admin Panel feature that will be overhauled with the 1.1.0 release will be the module management page. We will be taking a fresh approach to this page and hope to make it easier to understand at first glance. Right now it does not provide the most beginner-friendly environment for managing modules, and I believe that a redesign will clear up a lot of questions that people have when they first view the page. There is no set time frame for either of these releases at this point. Most likely a 1.0.4 version will not be too far off, my best estimate would be that it will be ready in early March. If you have any suggestions for improving the admin page please leave a comment and we will consider it for the 1.1.0 version.

I can remember several users in the past asking if it was possible to export user data from Pligg into Excel. It was an interesting idea, and it seemed especially useful for people who needed a simple way to export user email addresses to use for email campaigns. I recently discovered a PHP script that demonstrates how to export an array of data into a Microsoft Excel document. Using that script as a base I was able to come up with a very simple PHP script for Pligg that will export user data that is being stored in the MySQL database into a Microsoft Excel document. An example of such a document can be seen in the screenshot below.
The script sits in the root of your Pligg CMS site and first checks if the person accessing the script is logged into a “god” level account. If they aren’t it will redirect them to the Pligg login page. If a user is logged in as a “god” level user it will then connect to Pligg’s MySQL database. It then sends header information to your browser letting it know that it’s receiving a Microsoft Excel document and it should open the data as such. Lastly the script generates the data for Excel by grabbing information stored in the pligg_users table. The end result gives you an easy to read Excel data sheet with usernames, email addresses, registration dates and other useful information. The script is very easy to modify so if you don’t like the default data being used it’s not difficult to add your own columns. I’ve pasted the script below for anyone to use on their own website. Just copy these lines into a new file and rename it to whatever you want, just remember to add a .php extension to the end of the file name and store it in the root directory where Pligg CMS resides. You can also get a copy of the code from this pastebin post. Read the rest of this entry »

Shortly after the 1.0.2 release we were alerted to a vulnerability reported by Secunia and third party researcher Russ McRee. We have resolved the security issues in a timely manner and Secunia will be publishing their report on December 2, 2009. We thank Secunia for notifying us of the problems and properly coordinating the disclosure of this security threat. We do our best to provide quality code to prevent such security issues, but no CMS is perfect.

In addition to the security update, this release includes a new “Spam Trigger” module. We will be providing a video demonstration of this module in the next few days.

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This year we are offering a massive 25% discount at Pligg Pro to celebrate the biggest online shopping day of the year. For one day only you can receive 25% off by using the coupon code CYBMONDAY09 when checking out. This deal only lasts until midnight Monday evening EST and will be the absolute best deal you will find before the end of this year. In addition to the store-wide 25% discount we will be rotating some great discounts on individual items throughout the day, so keep coming back to see what items are going on sale at Pligg Pro because these deals won’t last.

The greatly anticipated Status Update Module is now available for purchase from Pligg Pro. This module has previously been covered in two blog articles, on where we demonstrated the features through a video screencast and another where we announced that you could try it out on the Pligg Design Gallery. The Status Update module page on Pligg Pro includes several screenshots of the module including the settings page and an image of the Status Update module in action on a site using Wistie. This collection of images as well as the detailed description provided should give you a pretty good idea of how the module works prior to making your purchase. If you have any questions though, feel free to ask us by replying to the Status Update announcement thread on the Pligg Forums. To benefit users who keep up with Pligg news we are offering the Status Update module at a special introductory price of $30. This deal will only be available for a short time, so if you are interested in adding more great social networking features to your Pligg website then we encourage you to buy it now before the deal expires.

We are happy to announce that we have chosen the top 3 free Pligg CMS templates. We took into consideration the overall design, the author’s history with the Pligg community, and any bugs discovered when testing the template. Also important were the number of votes each template received, how many people have marked the template as “Installed” on the forum, and the author’s commitment to keep the template up to date and provide support. First Place: Mystique This template by Unu immediately blew us away. Even though the original template was designed for WordPress, we can tell that the author has spent a considerable amount of time working on this template to make it fit Pligg CMS. There are a lot of great javascript effects and overall the template works with very few bugs to speak of. Second Place: Season This template by Sansui comes in four different flavors which can quickly be changed due some javascript magic. We are not huge fans of the color scheme or background images, but it looks like many Pligg users are using this template. Since the community voice is important to us we choose to ignore some of our personal preferences and award this template second place. Third Place: Galmark The final template was designed by forum member Shakila. While the design of Galmark is very nice, it suffers from a pretty big bug in the category navigation menu that could have easily been fixed. This bug along with the user’s lack of activity on Pligg.com are what made it rank third instead of second.

It looks like the pligg.com server was down for a short amount of time last night. The outage began a little before 5:00 am EST and continued until nearly 9:00 am EST. Some users on Twitter are reporting that the forums have been down for an extended period of time, but we are only able to detect that 4 hour period of time. If anyone has problems in the future accessing the forums or any other part of Pligg.com please Tweet us @pligg. Someone caught a bug in the 1.0.2 release that we would like to patch, so we will be re-releasing 1.0.2 this afternoon with a fix. The bug is related to the Groups feature for Pligg. Pagination on group published, upcoming and shared pages does not seem to work, resulting in group stories being displayed on one page rather than being spanned across many pages.

The latest version of Pligg includes many fixes and new features. The list of changes is quite extensive and can be read on the Pligg 1.0.2 release thread. One of the highlights include updates to CAPTCHA that allow you to require users to fill in a CAPTCHA field whenever a user submits a comment or story. As mentioned in the previous blog entry, we are working on providing more solutions to fight spam and by adding CAPTCHA to story and comment input forms you should be able to reduce some types of spam. A new “Auto Update” module has been added to make upgrading Pligg easier. It will detect when a new version of Pligg CMS is available and alert you from the admin panel when you should upgrade. The module then has the capability to download and extract the latest version of Pligg onto your server and run through the upgrade script. It’s still an early module that needs some testing, but we hope that making it available will encourage users to upgrade their site more frequently and closer to the release dates. One final note about this module is that users will still need to manually update any template files that have been changed between releases. Luckily the template changes are becoming less and less with each version of Pligg because of our module system. The final module worth noting is the XML Sitemap module, which has been updated to work with Pligg 1.0.2. It should provide search engines with a more accurate map of your site, resulting in improved search engine results. Things are a little easier to manage on your Pligg site with the 1.0.2 update. Improvements have been made to the admin panel group, comment and story management pages. It should now be easier to mass delete bad content from your website.