Pligg CMS Blog

Midphase has kindly set up a coupon code for Pligg users to use when registering for a web hosting account at either Midphase.com and ANhosting.com. The coupon code will get you a free domain for life and 3 months of free hosting. If you are looking for an entry-level host we suggest either of these hosts. And don’t forget to register your domains through Godaddy using our Godaddy Coupon Codes. For a step up in hosting you can try Autica.com or the really cool SingleHop.com for VPS and Dedicated hosting plans.

In the past 48 hours we have learned of 2 separate security exploits in the latest version of Pligg. We have patched one of the issues and the second problem has been fixed in several different ways. This is a warning post to all Pligg users that they will need to keep an eye on the Forum and Blog over the next 1-2 days until we post a proper security fix release. We will provide a new release that will have a patch for these security holes along with many bugfixes and a few new features since the last release from several months ago.

I will be attending the Web 2.0 Expo this year in San Francisco April 22-25, 2008. I thought that it might be a good opportunity to learn about some new technologies and meet and greet some people I’ve looked up to and perhaps in the off chance someone who might look up to me. If you live in the San Francisco area and are attending the Expo please leave a comment if you want to meet with me. If you aren’t planning on attending the Expo I will be setting aside some time outside of the Expo to meet and greet Pliggers who might be interested in learning more about the project. You can also leave a comment if you are interested in meeting me for coffee and I’ll try to plan something out ahead of time.

We’re looking for some new developers with a variety of skills to contribute to Pligg in their spare time. If you have any skills in PHP, MySQL, Javascript, XHTML/CSS, Template Lite, web server admin skills or many other similar talents please contact us by leaving a blog comment or by joining the Pligg Developers Facebook Group. If you have any friends who might be interested in helping out, don’t hesitate to forward them a link to this post or the Facebook group. Being part of an open source project like Pligg provides a lot of programmers with experience and skills that transfer into other projects and jobs. It also will look great on your resume. The biggest joy in becoming an open source developer are the connections and friends that you make along the way.

Today we’ve added a new section to the site to help connect job providers with Pligg developers. I have had dozens of requests for custom Pligg work, but unfortunately I am unable to take on any of the projects because I have a full schedule. I also see new threads popping up in the forum with similar proposals for freelance work and I thought that there should be a better way. The new job board provides a very easy way for recruiting candidates for your Pligg project and targets users who have a very specific expertise and interest. Rather than submitting a job to another site where you might have to pay a listing fee and are attracting users who might not have any experience with Pligg, listing a job on Pligg Jobs is a simple two step process.

• Step 1: Submit a job proposal with details about what you are looking for.
• Step 2: Confirm the listing via email (only the first time you make a listing) and receive a second link to edit or disable your job listing.

For job providers it really couldn’t be any easier finding the right person to take on the job. Once you have set up your listing you will receive an email with each applicant’s information and resume that you can use to select the right candidate. And if you later decide to remove your listing for whatever reason, it is just a “Deactivate it” link away. You can use the job board to hire a freelancer for a one-item contract job for something like integration with another CMS, or you can even use the board to find a full-time or part-time employee for longer projects.

Job applicants have it even easier than the providers, because applying for a job is only one click away. When viewing a page that interests you click on the “Apply now” button and fill in the information it asks for and press submit. Getting a job as a freelancer has never been this easy before has it? To see an explanation of how Pligg Jobs work check out the video above, or go try it out for yourself.

Our hosting company has notified us that they will need to take down many servers this evening (March 5, 2008) around 12:00 a.m. EST in order to perform “mandatory emergency power maintenance” for a period that should last about a half hour. They also advise that we power down our servers prior to this to safely preserve our data, so we may be shutting down our server for up to an hour. This post is to serve as a quick heads up for anyone who needs their daily Pligg fix who might frequent the forum late at night like I do. I will update this post after the server comes back online to confirm that everything went smoothly.

EDIT:

Turns out that our hosting company doesn’t need to take us off-line. We will not be turning off this evening as anticipated earlier.

A few days ago I updated OpenX, the script that we use on Pligg.com to manage advertisements. Formerly (last week) it was known as OpenAds, and a less than a year ago it was known as phpAdsNew. Today after checking the stats to make sure that everything was tracking correctly I decided to crunch some quick numbers to figure out how much the featured sites are paying per click on average. Based on the last three days of statistics, it turns out that monthly advertisers are paying about 0.095 cents per click, and half year advertisers are paying around 0.069 cents per click. I bring up these statistics because we’d love to earn some more advertisers. Our rates currently are $2.20/day for 6 month advertisers and $3/day for 1 month advertisers. Each advertiser receives an account to check their stats online along with weekly emails that include daily details for each days statistics.

Learn more about becoming a Featured Pligg Site here.

IRC Software

Colloquy (Mac and iPhone) / Trillian (Windows) / Konversation (Linux)
Communication is key when you work with a team spread across the globe. None of the Pligg developers have had a chance to meet in person, so it’s even more important that we have a tool that allows you to communicate with the group whenever we need to. Internet Relay Chat (IRC) is “used by millions of people, and thousands of organizations, to communicate, share, play and work with each other on IRC networks around the world. Serving the Internet community for over a decade, mIRC has evolved into a powerful, reliable and fun piece of technology” (mirc.com). We have used IRC since we started Pligg two years ago to communicate with the developers and Pligg users, and operate a room (#pligg) on freenode.net’s server. You can join the room without any software by logging in to our java web-based room.

FTP Software

Filezilla (Stand Alone) and Fireftp (Firefox Plugin)
Everyone needs a way to publish files to their web server, and my way is always the free way. Filezilla is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh platforms and is a stand alone client. Fireftp is a Mozilla Firefox plugin that operates within Firefox.

Browser Testing
Browsershots.org (Web) and MultipleIE (Windows)
Most designers without a lot of test computers have used Browsershots at one point or another to double check that their work is coming out the same on most browsers. “Browsershots makes screenshots of your web design in different browsers. It is a free open-source online service created by Johann C. Rocholl. When you submit your web address, it will be added to the job queue. A number of distributed computers will open your website in their browser. Then they will make screenshots and upload them to the central server.”

One problem that most web designers have is testing on multiple browsers. Not only do you have to design for the latest browser versions for Internet Explorer, but you have to accommodate the several previous versions of IE that are less friendly to deal with. Unfortunately the world isn’t perfect and a lot of systems are still running IE6 and below, to help test for these older versions of Internet Explorer I use MultipleIE. This software lets me run Internet Explorer 7 all the way back to Internet Explorer 3.0 all on the same operating system. For some reason I never heard of this software until recently, so I’m a bit hesitant to suggest it even though it has been an essential tool that I use almost daily.

Miscellaneous
HelpDesk Software Hesk (Web)
We use this software over at the Pligg Pro Helpdesk, where we support our shop products. The software gives you an easy way for users to submit support tickets and category administrators will receive email alerts whenever there’s a reply. It’s well organized, easy to install and simple to maintain. Most importantly, it helps us streamline our support system to let us fix problems faster.

Winmerge
The ultimate tool for those who customize Pligg in any way. Winmerge compares files and directories and helps organize the data so that you can merge two documents together in sections or as a whole. One recent example of how I use Winmerge is when I needed to update my Pligg 9.8.5 templates to the latest format for Pligg 9.9. What would normally take me a couple days took me only a few hours.

Notepad ++
Not everyone uses Dreamweaver for designing sites. If you are fluent enough that you can write without the assistance of a program like Dreamweaver, you might want to try out Notepad ++. It organizes data well and is a great replacement for the standard windows notepad. I find it to be a cleaner interface with fewer distractions.

I’ve seen a lot of other sites listing their top posts of the year, and it inspired me to share some interesting details about visitors to Pligg.com. We aren’t able to give an accurate number for traffic before mid June when we switched to using analytics on the entire site, so here are some stats collected since July 1, 2007 (5 months ago).

• The average visitor has stayed for 4 minutes and 41 seconds.
• The top 3 languages are English, Chinese, and German.
• The top 5 countires are the United States, China, United Kingdom, Canada and India.
• Top top browsers are Firefox (61.80%) and Internet Explorer (28.83%). Opera and Safari fall way behind at third and forth place at 3.96% and 3.78%.
• 84.69% of visitors use a Windows machine, 9.77% are Macintosh and 5.18% are Linux. A sad 0.02% are iPhones and below that are Nintendo Wii and Playstation 3 consoles.