Pligg CMS Blog

Transferring your site to a new webhost doesn’t have to be a pain, today I’m going to provide you with an easy to follow guide for backing up your website and changing webhosts.  This tutorial will guide you through using SSH, FTP, Pligg and phpMyAdmin methods for moving your data to a new server. These methods are not the only options for backing up your site, but they are some of the most commonly used and available methods. The tutorial seems long, but use the titles to skip sections that don’t apply to the method you choose for backing up your site.

Before beginning let me quickly outline the two items that need to be saved when you want to backup your website. The first part is usually pretty obvious, the files on your server need to be saved to your computer and moved to another webhost. The second item is the data used to populate your site with stories, users, votes, settings and a variety of other information. This information is stored in a MySQL database on your web host and is kept separate from normal files.

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It’s been 20 days since the RC1 release and it’s about time we get the next version out. Pligg 1.0.0 RC2 offers a lot of bug fixes from our previous release and a few new features and modules. The upgrade process from the Beta series still hasn’t proved to be a flawless process yet, but we are going to continue working on it so that older Pligg sites can update to the latest version without any problems. We’re closing in on a stable 1.0.0 thanks to the many users helping out by reporting bugs.

• Many bug fixes to and improvements to make Pligg compatible with more web hosts
• Improvements to upgrade script
• IP Blocker module
• TinyMCE WYSIWYG module
• Social bookmark module
• Experimental Upload module for attaching files and images to articles. This product is still in an early beta stage.
• Delete Cache button from admin panel
• Made the language file easier to read and update

Download Pligg 1.0.0 RC2 | Discuss Pligg 1.0.0 RC2

I’m proud to say that we are having a great start with out 1.0.0 Release Candidate version of Pligg. In 24 hours we had about 1,800 downloads and a lot of great feedback. The most important part is that we are learning about some bugs thanks to users willing to help test the software on various servers and because we now know what bugs need fixed it will be a lot easier for us to provide you with an updated version with fixes in a short amount of time.

So far the overall opinion of 1.0 has been really positive, and I’m glad to hear that everyone loves the new template for both pligg.com and Pligg CMS. It seems that for the most part installs are going smoothly on most servers. Upgrades still need a little more work, but I promise you it will be a more enjoyable upgrade experience by the time we release the final version.

What’s next for Pligg? Well the plan is to release at least 1 more release candidate version prior to a final one. We are developing an improved image/file upload and attachment module that should be available with the 1.0 final product. Once the final version is out we will dedicate ourselves to supporting users as best we can and at the same time we will be building additional modules and templates that will be provided for free on pligg.com. My personal priority is to get out 1 or 2 unique templates as quickly as possible just to offer some variety. We have a couple great module ideas that we are excited to begin working on and in time I will talk some more about one in particular that the developers have been dreaming up for a few months.

Tomorrow I won’t be spending much time by the computer since it’s Super Bowl Sunday, but starting Monday everyone will be back at work and the bug squashing begins.

Release candidate 1 of Pligg 1.0.0 has been released today and it’s going to blow your socks off. Even though this release is technically a test version prior to a final version, it is quite solid and packed 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 the latest version a try and not look back to our previous Beta series. I’m very proud of the work we’ve done to release this version of Pligg and I look forward to some bug squashing so that we can get a final 1.0 version out soon.

Download Pligg 1.0.0 RC1

Discuss this release on the Pligg Forums | Digg The New Pligg

We are in need of some courageous testers to play around with our latest SVN demo on the new testing ground http://www.pligg.com/demo/. This demo site is running one of the latest SVN builds of Pligg and we need users to jump on the site and start toying around with it so that we can analyze the database stress. The more people we get on the new demo site over the next 24 hours the better. Please note that the latest version of Pligg is still under development and you may experience some unpolished or even incomplete features that we are currently finishing up.

Sometime in the next 2 days the site database will go down for what I estimate to be about 30 minutes, followed by the forum being down for an additional 30 minutes. We will be performing an upgrade during this time and when doing this we need to temporarily suspend the database.

We have been suggesting to Pligg users that they should use the reCAPTCHA method for their site’s CAPTCHA for a while now, but until recently it wasn’t possible for us to set reCAPTCHA as the default CAPTCHA due to their use of randomized keys that they assign to domain names. A couple weeks ago reCAPTCHA announced that they would be allowing users to provide “global keys” which allow you to use the same public and private keys on any number of domain names. Now that reCAPTCHA offers this feature we are able to set a default key upon installation so that reCAPTCHA can be used with Pligg without any additional configuration or signups. Starting with Pligg 1.0, Pligg will be using reCAPTCHA as the default CAPTCHA method and site administrators won’t need to do a thing to configure it. You will still have the option to enter your own reCAPTCHA keys through the CAPTCHA module admin page, but it isn’t required anymore.

Hopefully this switch to reCAPTCHA will not only make your site more secure than the other CAPTCHAs, but you will be doing the world a favor because reCAPTCHA actually helps digitize books. You can learn more about how reCAPTCHA works and why it’s such a great cause by reading the What is reCAPTCHA page from their website.

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.

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.

We are redesigning our homepage and are in need of some great quotes from Pligg users to demonstrate how people are using Pligg and giving us some general praise. If you run a successful Pligg site, or work for a company that uses Pligg in some form, please leave a testimonial comment to this article and leave a valid email address so that we can contact you back and verify that you represent the said domain. Below are some ideas and items of information that we need:

1. Please leave an email address related to the site if possible. If you are writing a testimonial for example.com, your email should be someone@example.com. If you run Pligg on an internal company intranet you should provide us with a work email address if possible.
2. Tell us about HOW you are using Pligg.
3. If you are working for a company, tell us about the company.
4. WHY you chose to use Pligg. What benefits made you choose Pligg.
5. Tell us about your Pligg site’s success. More traffic, better work productivity, additional members joining, national or local news coverage, increased income?
6. What benefits have you seen from using Pligg?

We are not seeking sites that have merely installed Pligg and haven’t bothered to customize the template. We will only accept sites who have put a considerable amount of work into their sites and beyond that they should be newsworthy candidates.