We will be bringing down the Pligg forums for a short time (a few hours) to perform maintenance tasks on the forum and make some upgrades. After this is complete some of the former forum feature may disappear due to incompatibilities with the upgrade. Please contact us or leave a comment if you discover a bug on the forums tomorrow morning EST. I expect there to be a small number of bugs that will pop up, but we should gain some features and performance enhancements from the upgrade. Things should be back to normal by tomorrow morning.
For the rest of the month we are providing a coupon code to receive 20% off Pligg Pro orders of $20 or more. By ordering through Pligg.com and signing up for the Pligg Pro newsletter you are eligible to receive future discounts on new modules and templates down the road at even better deals than what we offer the general public. By ordering through the Pligg Pro shop you are both buying products directly from the people who built Pligg and supporting Pligg because 25% of each sale is donated to Pligg.
Pligg Pro Shop
Coupon Code: SeptemberSale08
Expires: October 1, 2008
The coupon code is limited to 50 sales, so act fast before coupon uses or time run out.
We’re adding in a lot of features to both the Pligg CMS and Pligg.com this month and we need beta testers to assist in helping us find and fix bugs until the end of the month. The beta testers will need to be familiar with using SVN to checkout the latest version of Pligg and create .patch files for our developers to test out. If you don’t know how to do this we can provide you with some helpful resources, including video tutorials, to get you started. Testers will need to simply run the latest version of Pligg on their own test servers and navigate around looking for bugs. Whenever they discover a bug they will need to report it to us in a private invite-only forum that we will invite beta testers to submit bugs to. We will open up a thread in that same forum with more detailed instructions and testing procedures.
We also are in need of fluent linguists who are able to translate Pligg from English to another langauge. We have spent many hours (and will continue to spend more) making Pligg multilingual-friendly for our next release. As a translator you are required to speak both English and the translated language fluently so that the translation will be as accurate as possible. The most basic translation requires that you translate the contents of the /language folder in Pligg using the latest SVN version. For those who want to go the extra mile we could also use some help translating Pligg documentation that will be included in the next release. Translators won’t be needed for another two weeks though as we wrap up our final build for release, until that point our language files will be changing frequently as we add new features and modify existing ones. We will begin translations on September 20, 2008, but translators should sign up before then so that we can notify you when the release is ready for translation. To apply to become a translator use your new Translator Application Page.
If you are interested in applying to become a beta tester please private message Yankidank through the Pligg forums or leave a comment to this post. If you leave a message on this blog post I will use the email you provided to contact you, which will be kept confidential.
About LemonTwist:
Originally designed as a theme for Wordpress by Chris Murphy, LemonTwist is now a free Pligg template released by Yankidank. The template is currently being developed for the next Pligg version (9.9.6). LemonTwist currently is designed to work with Pligg SVN revision 55 current as of August 18, 2008. Please DO NOT redistribute this template or any variation of it without getting my permission first.
For those who want to use a logo image with their site rather than a text name in the top left corner, please download the logo file attached to the official thread. It contains a .psd file for the logo image, you should then read NOTES.txt for more information about how to use it.
LemonTwist template for Pligg
Differences from Yget:
LemonTwist does not fully support the five star voting method. I decided that it’s not something I was interested in writing extra code to add in since very few Pliggers make use of voting method 2.
Version:
As of this blog post, the current version is 0.003.
Version numbers will be updated with each SVN revision commit that modifies this template.
To receive the most up to date version of this template please download it from the Pligg SVN under the /templates directory (not /trunk/templates).
It’s brand new and still needs a couple final fixes (see below bug list), but I consider this template to be quite stable. I should have a rock solid version of this template ready for inclusion with 9.9.6.
If you would like to contribute some help I would be glad to have the assistance. I would also greatly appreciate a donation using the Chipin widget associated with the forum thread. I invested a lot of time developing this template and I could use the money to help support me creating more free templates.
Known bugs:
- Check page management, currently submission isn’t redirecting to anything
- Vote doesn’t change to “voted” with ajax vote. Requires page refresh.
Support:
Limited support will be offered from myself once I finish this template. If enough users begin using this template I will create a new forum for bug reports and help requests.
Please check the README.txt and NOTES.txt files for more information about the LemonTwist template.
Download:
Download the latest version available from the SVN or the most recent forum release through the official LemonTwist thread.
It’s easier than ever to gather donations for adding features to Pligg now that we use ChipIn to easily add donation widgets to threads. You can see the new feature in action on the Pligg Projects page, helping us gather contributions for adding new features to Pligg. With ChipIn it’s easy to gather donations from multiple people to fund development.
Somehow for the past several months it slipped by me that the Pligg forum has been requiring users to log in to a forum account to download anything from any of the forums. That was definitely not my intent, and I now understand some of the frustrations that I’ve heard from users about how the main Pligg download isn’t easy to access. This will be a lesson to me to be more careful about checking the small details, you would have thought that I would have learned through all of the bug testing I do with Pligg.
Downloads in the forum have been straightened out, now you can download the latest version of Pligg without having to register for an account. Not only can you get the latest version of Pligg, but now the Pligg Templates and Pligg Modules forums are open for download without registration so now you can get all the free templates and modules without having an account. Of course, if you want support you should register an account, and even consider registering just to receive important email updates if a security threat is discovered.
I have decided tonight to retire the Downloads link from the top menu across the site because the forum downloads section wasn’t flexible enough to meet the needs of Pligg users. We no longer have a centralized file area, instead we will rely on forum thread attachments for downloads.
It’s come to our attention that there is an exploit available to bypass the default Pligg captcha method. The security issue seems to be the exploit that the hacker software “Auto-Pligg” is using to skip past user registration. We know what is causing the problem and are working on a fix that should be available shortly on the SVN and in the next version of Pligg which will be out shortly. The next version (9.9.6) will include several more security fixes and a few general upgrades. We also plan to offer a patch download for those who have recently downloaded Pligg 9.9.5 and will only want the updated files.
For now please switch your sites to the Recaptcha or “White Hat” captcha method using your Pligg Admin Panel until we post a solution.
35,000 emails have been sent out this evening to let Pligg users know that we have a security fix out to patch some of the recent vulnerabilities discovered in the Pligg core. The contents of the email can be found below.
Download Pligg 9.9.5
This week has been a stressful week for many Pliggers due to a security vulnerability discovered and exploited by a few hackers. It seems that even though we have not provided any changes in code over the past several months, three separate people seemed to find holes in the Pligg software all within the same few days. Since we first discovered the problem we have been frantically trying to patch the hole and get a release out to the public, and tonight we are ready to provide you with the first solution in protecting your Pligg site. I must thank many of you for posting to the forums some of the fixes that we have applied
First, please update to the latest version of Pligg available (currently 9.9.5). This release that was published just minutes ago should take care of many security vulnerabilities that the hackers are exploiting. I have also hired a third party expert to analyze and patch any security holes that might still exist in Pligg. I have also hired a part time coder to assist in developing Pligg over the next month as we approach 1.0. Any updates that I receive from either of these people will be added to the SVN and shortly after that the next Pligg version.
Second, we are developing a feature that will create registration confirmation emails that will hopefully stop, or at least slow down spammers and some hackers. You can expect this (along with a new default Pligg template) in version 1.0 which is due out soon.
Third, we will be providing you with frequent updates now through the Pligg blog as we continue to develop and refine our software. I am committed to improving Pligg and bringing in several new free templates over the next month. The latest version of Pligg will now display the latest Pligg Blog titles in the admin panel so you can keep an eye on developments.
Last but not least I must announce our new SVN server URL. We have changed services so that our developers can communicate and track changes better. You can now find our new SVN URL at:
https://pligg.svn.beanstalkapp.com/pligg/
You can also keep track of our SVN changes through Twitter using this url: http://twitter.com/pligg
