Archive for the ‘CMS’ Category

Additional Pligg.com Sale Details

I wanted to fill everyone in on what’s going on behind the scenes at Pligg.com because a lot of readers and Pligg users have been concerned about where Pligg might be headed. What most of you have been asking me are two things, the first being “why are you trying to sell Pligg”? The simplest answer I can give is that Pligg has been very difficult to manage with such a small team with a limited amount of time available to maintain the project. Not only does it take a lot of time to squash bugs and develop new features for the code, but keeping up with the forum takes a lot of time too. We also feel that at this point we have outgrown the foundation that we started with over a year and a half ago. I would like to completely redo the site and staff a full time developer, but we are not fortunate to do that at this point. I think that by selling the site we are able to hand over the project to someone better equipped to handle these things.  Seeing that Pligg is one of the most popular content management system’s out there today, I have no doubt that it will have a bright future with whomever takes it over. We have been in talks with a few investors, but I’m waiting another month to make sure that all investors have had an opportunity to pitch their idea and get a bid in. From what I’ve discussed with the current bidders, Pligg will greatly benefit from new ownership.

Possibly the question I’ve received the most during this sale price is “does the sale include the Pligg code”? A lot of people have approached us interested in buying the code along with the site, and many bloggers have written assuming that we were trying to include the code in the sale.  Pligg is open source and will remain open source, however if a buyer were to invest enough money we would be willing to consider writing fresh code as originally intended for Pligg 2.0.  This new code would be handed to the buyer so that they would have the option to license it however they want, open source or not.  Giving our lead developer a chance to write Pligg code full-time is one of the goals I have for selling Pligg.com. His knowledge and familiarity with Pligg would make him a valuable asset to the buyer and this would give him an opportunity to write better code, resulting a better content management system. I believe that most buyers are wanting to keep the code open source no matter what because of the many benefits of having a larger audience that open source brings.

If anyone has any questions about the Pligg sale, please contact Yankidank by way of a Pligg Forum PM. I would be glad to answer any questions from potential buyers, and even fill in bloggers with more details about the sale or Pligg in general.

Posted in Development, General, CMS | 1 Comment »

Commercial web scripts worth your money

Open source scripts are great and all, but sometimes authors of web scripts need to make a few extra bucks or even a full time career from their hard work. This blog entry is dedicated to some of my favorite commercial web scripts that I have purchased in the past, and why I decided to drop my hard earned cash on them.

The first script I would like to talk about is vBulletin. This forum script has two price ranges that might seem steep for most casual web developers. A $160 option lets you run the script indefinitely with one years worth of updates, the $85 dollar option leases the script for one year at a time and as long as you continue your annual lease you can keep getting the latest updates. Both of these options only let you run vBulletin on a single domain for a year and get you access to view all of the content on vBulletin.org, a support forum for vBulletin. vBulletin.org offers a lot of great modifications, templates and other amazing resources for helping you setup your site. vBulletin is worth purchasing in my case because it offers a humongous amount of features that you can control from the administration panel and the vBulletin community has a lot of great module authors willing to contribute their mods for free. Pligg’s forum runs about a couple dozen mods at this point in time, and every one of them is free. When I first purchased a license a year ago when Pligg first started I hesitated because $85 seemed like a lot when you compare vBulletin to other open source forum scripts like phpBB or Vanilla. If you have a chance to run a handful of open source forum scripts and then run vBulletin you will immediately see a difference in features that help demonstrate why it’s well worth your money to purchase a vBulletin license.

The next script that I use on Pligg.com is Mint. Mint functions as a very clean stats package for your site. Think of it as Google Analytics, only usable. I’ve always hated Google’s stats program because it’s really ugly and difficult to read at a quick glance. Mint makes things as easy as possible to read and offers add-ons called “peppers” to give you even more advanced stats. Mint costs a one time fee of $30, $19 to upgrade to the next major version. I’ve had to pay for both the original fee and the upgrade and I haven’t been amazed by the difference between Mint 1.x and Mint 2.x. Let me also mention that Mint’s website design is pretty awesome and I applaud them for their original design and interface.
See a demo of Mint by clicking here.

Tufat.com is probably one of my favorite commercial script sites because everything offered by the author is just $5. The author even has a few free scripts like osDate and MyBackup (highly suggested). Don’t think that paying just $5 is going to bite you in the butt in the end, Tufat scripts include free upgrades and they even have a support forum. Some of his more popular scripts are FlashChat and FlashBB.

Posted in General, CMS, Web 2.0 | No Comments »

Slashcode

Those familiar with Digg are usually familiar with the even more popular tech news site Slashdot.org. I have never really been a fan of Slashdot’s system for promoting stories through editors because I felt like it really limited the amount of news and would slow the ability for news to quickly get picked up by the public. The code originally used to create Slashdot has been publicly released with a GNU GPL.

The project’s name is Slashcode, and it’s so cold right now that you can pretty much consider it dead. The changelog doesn’t list any changes since 2003, which kind of proves why Slashdot is quickly becoming outdated. Luckily the documentation provided supplies users with enough information to install the code if you have a good amount of computer knowledge, but the code is far from a simple install script.

The reason I bring up this code is to demonstrate a proof of concept that Digg really shouldn’t have anything to fear by offering their code to the general public. Having a project like Pligg around really isn’t meant to replace Digg, it’s only meant to offer a new type of Content Managemnt System for users out there who are tired of so called “Web 1.0″ web applications that offer very little user interraction besides the ability to post comments.

Posted in General, Digg, CMS | No Comments »