Pligg CMS Blog

The 2009 Open Source CMS Awards recently started accepting nominations for this year’s awards. We can use your help to get Pligg CMS past the nomination stage, and all we are asking is for you to quickly cast your vote for Pligg in three categories. Just click on the three images below to be directed to the nomination pages and enter your name and email and submit your nomination. As a bonus this year’s awards are giving out a free iPod to a few lucky voters, so entering a nomination gives you a chance to win an 8GB iPod Touch. Once the nominations are complete they will begin a voting stage, once again offering 3 iPods to the voters of that phase so be sure to vote again if Pligg makes it to the next stage.

In order to fight spam on the forums I have reset all forum user’s signatures today. If you wish to reset your signature on the forums you can do so by adding one again through the forum user control panel. This one-time clearing of the signatures removed many older spam links that were inserted before we began requiring a minimum post count in order to have a signature. Since the post count rule did not apply to existing signatures when we implemented it, spam signatures have been sitting untouched for a couple of years. By wiping the slate clean on all signatures it only causes a slight nuisance for legitimate users, but completely destroys spammers. Forum signature spam is a big problem because it is difficult to continuously monitor over 43,000 user profile pages for inappropriate content. I apologize for the inconvenience caused by removing signatures, but it should be easy to update your signature. Before setting your new signature please review the forums signature rules that I’ve printed below:

1. Your signature may not contain more than 2 links and 1 of those links must be a Pligg-based website.
2. Your signature may not link to adult content of any sort. This includes any website that hosts adult affiliated content, whether that be imagery, language or other mediums.
3. Your signature must not be an eyesore. Please use normal size and color fonts so that your signature doesn’t distract from forum conversations.
4. You may promote items and services for sale in your signature provided that these items are directly related to Pligg CMS. For example a Pligg template for sale or design services for Pligg-based websites.
5. If your signature contains any elements that Pligg moderators dislike, we reserve the right to remove it or even ban your account. We take spam abuse and our own forum rules very seriously.

The Pligg CMS 1.0.1 update is now out and you can read the changelog on the official Pligg 1.0.1 forum thread. The biggest changes are to the 5 star voting method, since we wanted to use it on the new Pligg Design Gallery. 5 star voting will now display the user’s vote number on their voting history page rather than the average vote number displayed elsewhere. Users can also remove their votes (also known as unvoting) using the same unvote button used by the “Digg” voting method. There are also a number of fixes and smaller features added to this version of Pligg, so we recommend anyone running 1.0.0 to upgrade now. Update @ August 14, 7:00 PM EST: I’ve repackaged the 1.0.1 download because of a bug that broke the admin language editor. If you downloaded before 7:00 PM EST you should upload the new /libs/html1.php file to fix the problem. Thanks to forum member FnCool for the fix and billo for pointing out the problem.

I’ve noticed 2 new bugs today that will cause the 1.0.1 update to be pushed back at least until tomorrow. One bug is related to the 5 star voting method, and the second has to do with allowing admin users read and edit user profile fields. The 5 star voting method bug is somewhat critical since that voting method won’t work very well without fixing it, the other fix is much less critical but still important.

Tomorrow, August 13, 2009, we will be releasing an update for Pligg CMS and we will also be upgrading the Pligg Forums. Prior to the Pligg CMS release we will bring down the forums for about an hour. Once we have finished the upgrade process the Forums will be brought back online and we will release Pligg CMS 1.0.1. An extensive changelog will be published with the Pligg CMS 1.0.1 release thread that will detail the main changes since Pligg 1.0.0. An email will be sent out to forum members tomorrow after we have upgraded the site and prepared the next release.

After spending a while hosting our SVN with Beanstalk, we’ve decided to switch back to SourceForge. Even though SourceForge doesn’t offer some of the great features that Beanstalk offers, the Achilles’ heel of Beanstalk is that it doesn’t give unregistered users access to their great web interface for browsing files. The lack of this feature hurts open source projects like Pligg CMS and after a year of us waiting for them to add the feature we’ve given up on Beanstalk. SourceForge.net now offers a much improved user interface and more useful features since we originally left over a year ago. They also are a great source for attracting open source developers, which we are always on the lookout for. Now that we are back with Sourceforge you will see more updated figures and statistics provided by SourceForge, along with updated download packages hosted by SourceForge. Update your SVN information and point it to http://pligg.svn.sourceforge.net/ to get the latest Pligg Subversion repository. We have also updated our download counter script today to make it much more accurate. It now grabs real-time figures from several sites that host Pligg downloads. This update jumped our download counter up by about 1,500 downloads from what we had previously published.

Pligg hit the 200,000 tracked downloads mark last week, with a download rate of about 500 downloads each day since Pligg 1.0.0 was released 8 days ago. To celebrate this mile marker I have developed and released a Pligg template that features the new ability to vote both UP and DOWN on stories. The template is called “The Standard” and it is a free 2 column template for Pligg. If you look under the hood of the template you will notice that it’s very much based on the default Pligg template “Wistie”. I performed many of the changes through editing the CSS file. I designed this template because I know that a lot of users don’t want to start designing a template from Wistie because it’s a 3 column template. It didn’t take much work to change Wistie to a 2 column template. From there I just added some images and adjusted the width of a few template files to match the new 2 column format. Hopefully this template will be used to generate some free 2 column templates that others can contribute to the Pligg Templates forum. The new template allows users to vote either up or down on stories, in some cases resulting in negative numbers appearing. A story still needs to reach a set positive number in order to become “published”, but once it is published it can go negative and remain on the homepage. The Standard will be included as a second template with the next release of Pligg, but we cannot guarantee long term support for it. You can learn more about the template by viewing the official The Standard template thread.

We’ve been busy over the past year and there’s a lot to show for it. The new version of Pligg is more stable, secure and feature packed and best of all it’s still FREE. We will continue to develop Pligg as usual, and starting with 1.0.0 we will be making fewer changes to template files (besides bug fixes) so that templates will continue to work as we release updates. We suggest that anyone running Beta 9.9.5 should upgrade to 1.0.0 to ensure that you are running the most secure version of Pligg. The most exciting feature for Pligg 1.0.0 is that we are now supporting 3 languages. During the installation process you will be able to select from English, German and Thai languages. By selecting one of these languages it will change the language of your entire Pligg site and admin panel. If you are interested in translating Pligg to another language please join the Pligg Translator Google Group.