Are you keen on building a news site with features of a typical social
networking site? Pligg portal enables users to submit their own content which is
then categorized as an 'upcoming story'. Once a story recieves enough number of
votes, it is promoted to the main page of the portal automatically. A user can
also write a short version of his story and share the same with a group of
users. Besides, vistors can comment on a story, and others can rate it. Just as
you would expect from a social networking site, Pligg allows users to create
their profiles as well as create groups. It also supports private messaging as
well as RSS feeds. RSS feeds from other websites can also be used for adding
stories on a Pligg portal automatically.
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Applies To: Web Masters Price: Free USP: Build your own news portal Primary Link: www.pligg.com Google Keywords: CMS, Pligg |
Installing Pligg
You require PHP4 and MySQL 4.0 or later as pre-requisites for installing
Pligg. Download the package from pligg.com and copy it to the root of your
webserver. Now rename settings.php.default to settings.php, and
dbconnect.php.default to dbconnect.php under libs folder. Also create a database
for Pligg in MySQL.
Now run the installer by going to localhost/pligg/install (here put the name
of your webserver instead of localhost). This will launch the installation
wizard, which will ask you to specify settings of your database, ie, database
name, username, password, etc. Next, it will ask you to choose the admin account
details -admin login name, password, email etc. Once you have created an admin
account, Pligg is ready to use. Now you need to delete the /install directory
from your webserver and change credentials of /libs/dbconnect.php to 644.
When submitting news, visitors can specify the category and group in which the news should be featured. |
As a user submits a news item, it is displayed under Upcoming News. Only after getting sufficient votes it is moved to main portal. |
How to use
Once Pligg is installed, it's very simple to use. Before you start posting
news, you need to create groups. To create a group, just go to group option on
the main menu and then on create a menu. Provide a name for the group and write
a description. You would also need to specify group privacy setting i.e public,
private or restricted. Next, you need to specify the number of votes required to
publish a story. You can also provide email addresses of your friends, whom you
would like to invite to this group.
Through Pligg admin interface, you can perform actions such as user mangement, news management, back-up, etc. |
In Pligg, you can also configure ratings for the comments posted by the visitors visiting your site. |
To post a news, an user needs to register first. Pligg by default comes with
re-captcha. Once an user is registered, he can modify his profile. Now if you
want to post a news which is already published on some other website, go to
'SUBMIT A NEW STORY' link on the main menu. Provide the URL of the site the
story is already published in, write the story title, tags, your own description
about the story and specify a category and also the group for the story. Your
story will be visible under 'UPCOMING NEWS' menu.
Admin interface
From the admin interface, you can perform tasks like user management, news
management, backup etc. To add new modules to your Pligg site, go to modules
option at the top of the menu. In the module management page, just click on
'Install'. In admin interface, you can also modify the captcha to be used, by
default it supports reCaptcha, WhiteHat Method and Math Question. However, you
need to just enable them. From admin interface, you can also change templates
and modify SEO settings of Pligg.