Tomorrow, August 13, 2009, we will be releasing an update for Pligg CMS and we will also be upgrading the Pligg Forums. Prior to the Pligg CMS release we will bring down the forums for about an hour. Once we have finished the upgrade process the Forums will be brought back online and we will release Pligg CMS 1.0.1. An extensive changelog will be published with the Pligg CMS 1.0.1 release thread that will detail the main changes since Pligg 1.0.0. An email will be sent out to forum members tomorrow after we have upgraded the site and prepared the next release.
Update 1: Thursday, August 13, 10:30 AM I’ve just detected a problem with the upgrade not moving threads to the new forums. I will need to revert the threads back by 30 hours to recover these missing threads. The forums will be pulled offline for another hour for testing beginning after noon EST.
Update 2: Thursday, August 13, 01:20 PM I’ve completed the forum upgrade. If you experience any broken thread URLs please let me know. If the threads have been removed from the forum you should be redirected to either the forum homepage or the new Gallery page depending on the thread you were trying to view. Unfortunately I had to use a database backup from 30 hours prior to the upgrade, so I have lost the past day of data and new user registrations. If you have registered in the past 2 days on the Pligg forum you will need to re-register.
After spending a while hosting our SVN with Beanstalk, we’ve decided to switch back to SourceForge. Even though SourceForge doesn’t offer some of the great features that Beanstalk offers, the Achilles’ heel of Beanstalk is that it doesn’t give unregistered users access to their great web interface for browsing files. The lack of this feature hurts open source projects like Pligg CMS and after a year of us waiting for them to add the feature we’ve given up on Beanstalk. SourceForge.net now offers a much improved user interface and more useful features since we originally left over a year ago. They also are a great source for attracting open source developers, which we are always on the lookout for. Now that we are back with Sourceforge you will see more updated figures and statistics provided by SourceForge, along with updated download packages hosted by SourceForge.
Update your SVN information and point it to http://pligg.svn.sourceforge.net/ to get the latest Pligg Subversion repository.
We have also updated our download counter script today to make it much more accurate. It now grabs real-time figures from several sites that host Pligg downloads. This update jumped our download counter up by about 1,500 downloads from what we had previously published.
Pligg hit the 200,000 tracked downloads mark last week, with a download rate of about 500 downloads each day since Pligg 1.0.0 was released 8 days ago. To celebrate this mile marker I have developed and released a Pligg template that features the new ability to vote both UP and DOWN on stories. The template is called “The Standard” and it is a free 2 column template for Pligg.
If you look under the hood of the template you will notice that it’s very much based on the default Pligg template “Wistie”. I performed many of the changes through editing the CSS file. I designed this template because I know that a lot of users don’t want to start designing a template from Wistie because it’s a 3 column template. It didn’t take much work to change Wistie to a 2 column template. From there I just added some images and adjusted the width of a few template files to match the new 2 column format. Hopefully this template will be used to generate some free 2 column templates that others can contribute to the Pligg Templates forum.
The new template allows users to vote either up or down on stories, in some cases resulting in negative numbers appearing. A story still needs to reach a set positive number in order to become “published”, but once it is published it can go negative and remain on the homepage. The Standard will be included as a second template with the next release of Pligg, but we cannot guarantee long term support for it. You can learn more about the template by viewing the official The Standard template thread.
We’ve been busy over the past year and there’s a lot to show for it. The new version of Pligg is more stable, secure and feature packed and best of all it’s still FREE. We will continue to develop Pligg as usual, and starting with 1.0.0 we will be making fewer changes to template files (besides bug fixes) so that templates will continue to work as we release updates. We suggest that anyone running Beta 9.9.5 should upgrade to 1.0.0 to ensure that you are running the most secure version of Pligg.
The most exciting feature for Pligg 1.0.0 is that we are now supporting 3 languages. During the installation process you will be able to select from English, German and Thai languages. By selecting one of these languages it will change the language of your entire Pligg site and admin panel. If you are interested in translating Pligg to another language please join the Pligg Translator Google Group.
We are spending some time over the next few days upgrading servers and transferring things over. During that time you may notice either a slowdown in page load times or even short periods of downtime. We may even lose a small amount of forum data during the changeover and I apologize ahead of time should we lose any of your posts during this transition. After the upgrade it would be appreciated if you would report any bugs that you might come across in the forums. I will write a follow up blog post with more information when I have something to share.
We are performing some final bug fixes and adding in one last feature before the big announcement. The last feature to be added in will be an altered vote method that will allow users to vote either up or down. Currently it’s possible to accomplish this through some clever templating, but the solution is more of a hacked patch than usable code. You can expect some new templates in Pligg Pro to take advantage of the new up/down vote method that will be added into Pligg soon.
The release date for 1.0 Final will probably be Tuesday, June 16, 2009. I hoped to release mid next week, but I suddenly have to travel all of next week and I won’t be able to work my normal 12 hours a day. Unless something major happens between now and the 16th you can expect the 1.0 release to be out soon. Until then you can grab the latest SVN versions for the latest bug fixes and features.
We will be ending the donation drive, and stop making the Magazeen template and Plingger module available for donors after 1.0 is out. If you want to get your hands on the Magazeen template or Plingger module you must have your donation of $20 or more in before 1.0 final is released. I suggest that you take advantage of the offer because Magazeen is really great template that I’ve put a lot of time into and it’s a great deal for just $20.
Update: Pligg 1.0.0 is out now and can be downloaded from the forums. Release notes and a dedicated blog post will come soon. As you might expect we’re busy at work now.
I spent some time today upgrading our troubleshooter page, which can be found as one of the navigation tabs at the top of the installation and upgrade pages. Previously the troubleshooter had a limited number of checks that it would run on your site to test for common problems. Now the troubleshooter will detect all files and folders that need their CHMOD settings altered. I even caught a couple folders that I forgot to CHMOD myself when first running the new troubleshooter, darn avatars subfolders.
The page will also detect a few other problems such as PHP features that might not be turned on for your server, resulting in a broken Pligg. This will help you figure out if your server is compatible with Pligg, and even give you some instructions on fixing some problems. We aren’t asking for anything radical, just PHP 5 and MySQL 5 along with a few standard options like the GD Graphics Library and fopen. Even if you find your server setting off some red flags on the troubleshooter page your server will probably work. The red warnings only serve as a guideline for supported servers. You may find more errors on your server if it doesn’t come up all green.
There have been a number of spam emails being sent out from job board applicants over the past week so today I added ReCaptcha to the application form when applying to any job posts at http://www.pligg.com/employment. Now in order to post or apply to a job you must fill in a ReCaptcha field to prove that you are human. This will dramatically reduce the amount of spam content that has been appearing in employer inboxes and ensure that only legitimate providers are posting to the Pligg Open Source CMS Job Board.
