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Create Your Own Digg Like News Portal

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

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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Direct Hit!

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.

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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.

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