What to Expect from Pligg 1.0
I think it’s about time that I emerge from the shadows of Pligg development and reveal some details about what’s been going on behind the scenes with Pligg CMS. It has been a few months since our last release, and there’s good reason for our delay because we are attempting to prepare a Pligg 1.0 version that will provide a very different experience from what Pligg CMS users are used to. This post will outline what you can expect in the next version in Pligg. We will go into further specifics and better examples in follow up video posts in the nearby future.
New Features. Most of these will be covered in their own blog posts.
- New Template
- New Admin Panel
- More Spam Prevention Tools
- Advanced Search
- Category Authors
- Admin Help Documents
- Story Comment RSS Feeds
- Fully Anonymous Mode Module
- Votes by IP
- Groups
Before I start on the new features to Pligg CMS I would like to mention a new feature added to the Pligg Forum. We have added the ability for forum members to mark module and template threads as “Installed” which will keep you up to date with new releases and allow developers to see how many Pliggers are using their contributions. This feature is still in beta, but I encourage users to mark modules and templates as installed if they are using them. It will make tracking updates a lot easier down the road.
Click on the images above for a description of each page.
View the Gallery here on Flickr
The first Pligg CMS 1.0 change that I would like to talk about is the new admin panel for Pligg. It’s a completely new and much more intuitive interface that will give Pligg admins better control over their site. Best of all, the template is completely independent from the Pligg template that your site uses, so if you want to edit your Pligg site templates it won’t interfere with the admin panel in any way. Another benefit of the separated admin panel template is that upgrades won’t always require template upgrades to get the latest admin panel features. The new Pligg admin panel will make it easier to modify users, stories, modules and categories.
Along with the new admin panel design, we have a new default template called “Wistie”. More information will be revealed about Wistie in future posts. Since it’s brand new and is designed to work with all of the new features it deserves more than just a mention on this post. For now you can check out some screenshots of Wistie above in the slideshow or directly below.
Pligg 1.0 will include several new features, but perhaps the most important ones are the several small improvements that will help defend your site against spammers. We’ve been listening to users on the Pligg forum complain about the amount of spam they have to manage on a daily basis. While no spam solution is perfect for content management systems that allow public discussions, we think that we’ve done a pretty good job with Pligg 1.0’s series of spam-stopping features. We did this by thinking more like a forum CMS than a blogging one, since Pligg really functions as a hybrid of the two.
The first feature is a simple user email activation system. When users sign up to your site you can now require that they verify their email address. This is a rather basic form of spam control, but it does work to stop some spam. Most forum CMS software use this method in combination of CAPTCHA as their primary spam defense. Now Pligg does too. If a user has an issue activating his account it’s a simple one-click activation from the admin panel to validate their account for them.
The second spam-stopping feature is the Submit Antispam Addon (http://forums.pligg.com/pligg-modules/13972-submit-antispam-addon-v-0-1-a.html) by AnAlienHolakres3. Alien has designed what is probably the most advanced Pligg module ever to be made, and it is a very interesting method for dealing with spam and users who don’t publish quality stories. The module works by limiting the number of submissions an author can add to a site within a given time frame. The more votes the story author receives in a time frame, the more stories he will be allowed to submit. This is probably one of the harsher methods for dealing with spam, but it doubles as a method for promoting only quality stories to your website.
December 1st, 2008 at 7:25 pm
Looks great. So when can we expect to be able download it? Since we are separating the admin templates to the site template, would this mean our custom templated does not require changing??
December 1st, 2008 at 8:50 pm
Unfortunately, there have been some significant changes to the templates to accommodate new features and new “module hooks“. So templates will need to manually update for this version. The module hooks added though should reduce the number of template updates required in future versions. The whole point of the 1.0 version is to get Pligg at a point where template updates will be less common between versions. I will try to provide some hints for updating templates, but I believe that the best idea is to work from Wistie and modify it into your template which I don’t believe would be too difficult if you are familiar with Pligg templates.
December 2nd, 2008 at 2:53 am
Do you have a server with allreaddy instalt pligg so i can pat … dollar in the mounth for rent it. (alreaady working pligg with feeds etc.).
Fred.
December 2nd, 2008 at 5:30 am
Great news – We are all impatient to see it in production !
December 2nd, 2008 at 6:07 am
Can’t wait to see the upcoming pligg. The features displayed above are just superb. Really looking forward to try my hands on it. Will it be an easy upgrade from 9.9.5?
December 2nd, 2008 at 3:39 pm
Hi!
Great features. When could we see this released?
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:31 pm
This looks great – one thing I would suggest in the template – it might get confusing to people with having the navigation with PUBLISHED NEWS, UPCOMING NEWS, SUBMIT A NEW STORY, etc be the same color as the category navigation area – it looks like it is sub-navigation at that point when really it isn’t.
Also, shouldn’t PUBLISHED NEWS and UPCOMING NEWS actually be a sub-navigational element of the category navigation since you click on a category first and then click on PUBLISHED NEWS and UPCOMING NEWS to switch between those views of a specific category?
I would look at digg.com as they have the hierarchy correct I believe (although the funny thing is they don’t seem to follow the category you already selected which doesn’t make sense; seems to me once you select a category you should stay in that for the view you select until you decide on a different category or select ALL for all categories).
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:34 pm
I forgot to add – I personally like the way mixx.com handles upcoming which is in the news story area itself. it shows popular, on deck, upcoming – it basically becomes a view in the sort area.
I think having a separate tab for upcoming is dated. Not sure if people agree or not on this.
December 2nd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Great update. Can not wait to get my hand on the new pligg. However when is the auspecious day? When you plan to release it to the public? Please say this month before christmas. It will be our gift from you. Thanks
December 3rd, 2008 at 8:53 am
Nice to have some new news about 1.0. Ever thought about adding reCAPTCHA to the signup prosses to also help stop the spammers? It is the most efective anti spam method iv found to date and would not punnish legit users as the the one mentioned in the post.
December 3rd, 2008 at 10:06 am
Just come back and I can see good things happened here. Can’t wait for the release.
@Mytob
reCAPTCHA in registration is already in Pligg 9.9.5. You have to choose in Admin Panel.
December 3rd, 2008 at 3:52 pm
Yap, Spam is the biggest threat and glad to see that so much work has been done on the part of preventing spam in new Pligg. However, real story can be revealed only after we get to use Pligg 1.0 :)
December 5th, 2008 at 4:49 pm
Thanks for the reply Eric. One other question. I have done just about all the modifications to increase pligg’s speed. Its still slow. Will there be much speed improvement apart from the modifications suggested in the forum?
December 5th, 2008 at 5:02 pm
We’ve made some small changes to hopefully increase the server speed. Probably the biggest difference is that we completely removed the old pageviews function from Pligg, which was logging information that we weren’t putting to much use. If we could get some more funding or development support I would also like to take more steps to help reduce server load and increase load times.
December 5th, 2008 at 6:18 pm
Cool! I thought you guys had given up.
How hard will it be to upgrade a site?
December 5th, 2008 at 6:33 pm
The upgrade process will be identical to the method we have used in the past, only with some tweaks to the user interface process that we made to the install and upgrade pages. The upgrade script will automatically make changes to your database that will be required to use some of the new features. If you don’t want to use the new default template you will need to make the manual upgrades to your existing one to match a lot of the bug fixes and new features included in the new template. We suggest reworking your template, basing it off of the new template structure.
December 7th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
When will 1.0 be released to the public?
December 8th, 2008 at 11:49 am
Great news, I have been testing 0.9, but now waiting for 1,0 to use on my website.
Are multiple categories incorporated into 1.0??
December 8th, 2008 at 8:49 pm
Hell, when do you think v.1.0 will be released?
December 9th, 2008 at 8:59 am
Ive just seen the pictures and already im in love x
looks great guys, i think pligg has moved so far and even further than i expected when i picked my pligg site to do,
thanks guys im realy looking forword to this release,
December 9th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
Hey Eric,
Will Pligg 1.0 technically indicate subcategories? What I mean is, will the URL indicate that it has a parent category?
I ask, because when I use URL method 2 atm – the URL is:
http://www.somexdomain.com/category/child-category/
rather than (the more preferred):
http://www.somexdomain.com/category/parent-category/child-category/
Any thoughts on this?
December 9th, 2008 at 8:30 pm
Yes, I have installed 9.9.5 awhile back and done loads of mods from forum as well as my own mods added modules to it customised stuff. Everything has been done ready for a spectacular launch until I found out about version 1.0. It seems a lot has been put into V1 that I have decided to sit by the sidelines to wait for its arrival instead. Looking forward to it. Thanks Eric.
December 12th, 2008 at 4:35 pm
I am specially interested on spam managing, like detecting, and blocking hosts and user easier than now.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:20 pm
As far as i know the team is trying to release the v1.0 by the middle of January 09. Thanks
December 21st, 2008 at 5:17 pm
Hi,
I was wondering if the new version will be able to integrate with Joomla easily. If you guys can make it work with a simple plug in or bridge..that will be really great and it will give Pligg more clout and clients for sure. Just a thought! Thanks
December 21st, 2008 at 5:18 pm
Middle of January would be awesome. :)
December 29th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
HI ERIC
iT WOULD BE COOL IF ARTICLES AND COMMENTS POSTED
COULD BE POSTED DIRECTLY ON TWITTER (THE CONVERSATION
STARTS ON TWITTER) !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
THIS WILL BE REALLY REALY COOL
January 16th, 2009 at 7:18 pm
I think all the new look and settings will be great but will it be easy to upgrade from a old install such as 9.9.5
as the database will need updating ?
January 21st, 2009 at 3:57 am
Are there any chances for sql queries optimalizations? some queries from 9.9.5 generate too much load.
January 30th, 2009 at 2:53 am
[...] full with great new features. As discussed previously, this version of Pligg will have a lot of great new features, including security fixes and database optimizations. I highly recommend that new Pligg users give [...]
February 1st, 2009 at 12:04 am
Nice work! The spam prevention tool is really cool.
February 4th, 2009 at 4:03 am
It is my first time to use pligg. i m amazed how easy they have made it to create another digg. i m eagerly looking towards final release.
February 15th, 2009 at 3:18 pm
There is a major problem with registration and password reseting. The password reset and sent to the user is always “password”. If the user forgets to change the password after reseting, it can cause major security problems. Why can you not randomly generate a whole new password and send to the user, instead of “password”.
March 12th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
Is there any chance that groups will have an events module?