A lot of Pliggers have been calling for some integration scripts to be written to share user information with existing web software. To help organize the future development of integrated Pligg versions and mods I have created a new “Integration” category containing 6 sub-forums. Three of the most popular forum scripts are at the top of the list, followed by two of my favorite Content Management Systems (CMS). The final sub-forum is “Other“, where you can suggest an additional sub-forum or just post any general questions about integration.

New Forums:

While I’m at it writing this post, I thought that I should mention that I have been sick all of this weekend and I haven’t had a moment to work on Pligg’s template. This means that Beta 6’s new template may be put off a bit longer. I am considering putting together a simple template for Beta 6 and making the bigger move to what I have been working on with the Beta 7 release.

If you are a Pligg user, please post your Pligg site in the new Pligg Directory located at http://www.pligg.com/links/. I have categorized the directory into 12 categories, but I’m sure there will be a few more added in the future. Here’s a list of the current categories:

Arts
Business
Food
Games
Health
International
Movies/Television
Music
Shopping
Sports
Technology
Travel
Other

If you have a request for an additional category please post it as a reply to this thread. Hopefully this new directory will be a good way to showcase who’s using Pligg and drive some traffic to site’s just starting up.

While reading through some random blogs today I came across a nice use of AJAX for finding .net and .com domain names. The tool provided by instantdomainsearch.com is a nifty way to find a .net or .com domain. While I was playing with the tool I noticed that pligg.net was registered about 10 days ago, Its fun to see that pligg is becoming a big enough word that people are buying pligg.domains. I’m very interested to see what pligg.org will turn into.

I was looking up what the alexa.com ranking for pligg.com was and I’m proud to say that we are pretty high up there for a site open for barely even a month. Currently pligg.com is ranked 139,063 (the lower the better), I expect that number to rapidly keep decreasing for the next few months as the project really starts to show it’s true colors. I must admit though that you should never rely on alexa.com for accurate site ratings. Alexa can and is cheated all the time and gets it’s numbers from users who have the alexa toolbar installed in their browser. This means that if you have a site with 200,000 unique visitors a month and none of them have the alexa toolbar installed, not a single one of them will be counted toward the alexa.com web ranking system.

I would appreciate if someone took this on and developed this as a side project:
I have been noticing quite a bit of spam already on pligg.com, one user particularly has been spamming stories a couple times a day and I’m really tired of setting the status of their stories as “discard”. We currently have no ability to completely remove a story from the database, which is a bummer because we can’t completely remove a story from the site yet. My plea for someone out there with php skills and some free time is for a method for physically removing a message from the database.

It is also necessary to start thinking about spam prevention and the ability to ban spammers. A spam system is something far off in the future probably for Pligg, but a simple ban solution should begin development soon. I think that we could have an effective ban system that will allow the admin to send a warning for minor problems and IP ban users who continually spam, flame or do anything dumb. If you have any suggestions or ideas about any of these three topics please leave a comment and I’ll try to address your comment in the future.

I find it hilarious that a templating system named Smarty can make me feel so dumb. I believe that I have finished the top and bottom code for the new template, but everything in the middle is iffy. When I think that I have solved one problem, another problem pops up. I spent a small amount of time today trying to get a small amount of template finished and by the end of the night I am further behind from where I started. I added a new story and it somehow screwed up my layout on the front page. I was able to fix part of it, but now my sidebar is back down below where it shouldn’t be.

I swear that the code will sometimes fix itself because there have been a few instances where something doesn’t work, I edit the code… it still doesn’t work… then I hit edit undo and it works again. I really want to get this template finished so I can work on a few more templates that are just tweaked versions of the final layout. I would also like to get around to adding some code that meneame now includes, including a tagging script.

Since I brough up tagging, I think it’s important that I talk about what I would like to see with Pligg. Lots of people hate tags from the bottom of their hearts, which I kind of agree with. I think that having words tagged onto articles makes it appear really tacky and only clutters a page. At the same time, the ability to categorize with keywords is really valuable. It could really help when users are searching for a specific topic, and help weight the searches. I would like to make it so that when using the Pligg search bar it will weight the search results so that items tagged with the word appear higher up on the search results. I think this would make the search function much more useful and accurate.

Right now my main concern is the Smarty template. I could really use a second or third person familiar with Smarty and CSS to assist me so that we can finally move on to our new template. While I’m requesting help, we could use a couple PHP coders to help out Ash. Ash took over the sourceforge.net project so that we could start tracking bugs and distributing the code through their site. Hopefully being on SF will help find us a couple dedicated coders to help the project grow.

https://sourceforge.net/projects/meneame/

To save space on the Pligg Forum I have created a blog to keep everyone up to date with the latest Pligg developments. I was inspired to create this blog just to test out the trackback functionality of Pligg.