In today's CMS world where Drupal and Joomla strive to be everything it has become necessary for newcomers to the market to make out-of-the-box names for themselves. Pligg is such a CMS. Installing Pligg gives you a Digg.com like website without knowing PHP or MySQL.

Beta but ready

Pligg is Web 2.0 Content Management System unlike any other existing CMS. Pligg's Web 2.0 user interface gives your visitors a reason to come back to your site by making them decide on the site's content and by doing so participate in a social network. Pligg is in beta 8 but is ready for production use. This is mostly due to it's origins as a production clone of Digg.com

Origins

Recently a site called Meneame which emulated digg.com opened it's source code up. The problem for most is that the code is written in Spanish and installation documentation was non-existent. A translation of this software to english became Pligg, a branched off version from the original Meneame code. One of the major changes made is that Pligg uses a template engine called Templite Lite allowing the Pligg community to make their own templates.

Getting community support becomes more universal because Meneame is a Spanish website where as the Pligg website is in English. The Pligg fork also allows site admins the ability to control their site from an admin panel where they can manage users, change any text in the template, backup their sites (files and database) and configure all of the site's options. Creating categories is also done from the newly added admin panel.

Hot and heavy community

The community surrounding Pligg is about 2,000+ and growing. First look at the demo will surprise most with it's out-of-the-box appeal. It will be interesting to see how fast it grows because software of this type is in hot demand. Taking a look at some of the websites done with the software shows why.

• dealspy.org/
• bestweekever.tv/ble/
• videosift.com/
• agentb.com/
• devbump.com/
• hugg.com/
• dealigg.com/
• plugim.com/
• bandbuzzer.com/
• gamelemons.com/squeeze/

I have to point out that having an open source version of this type of software leads to many new and individual ideas. I was quite impressed with dealigg.com a website that uses Pligg so that members can vote on the value of the latest bargains and sales of consumer goods.

Knowing your community

The developers of Pligg seem to know that "eating your own dog food" is not necessary when it comes to building a solid community. They do not try and force Pligg into the mold of forum software and choose to use vBulliten instead. This shows right away that the developers are in touch with their user base. If only other open source PHP CMS projects had similar smarts.

The pluses outweight the minuses

Right now the most obvious problem with Pligg is the lack of documentation. This is due to it previously being a propietory software done in a non-english language. But now that Pligg is open source and in demand these shortcomings will disappear very quickly. In the coming months there will be more news and excitement coming from this project. Guaranteed.

Happy Publishing!

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