Build Your Own Digg Clone Site With Pligg

Pligg is a popular open source content management system (CMS) software that allows us to create a social bookmarking and voting system like Digg for example.

The software is installed as a PHP/MySQL script on your web server. The CMS is available free of charge but does come with upgrades and Pro themes, etc.

Upon closer inspection into this software here is what I learned.

Below you see a screens hot of the Pligg homepage.

First you need to download the file to your hard drive. Then extract the files. You can use a file extractor to do this.

You can get the latest version of Pligg Beta 9.8 from Sourceforge

Below is a screen shot of an example interface. As you can see the site contains voting buttons which can be named to your own liking. There are many themes available, both for free and paid. This allows you to style the CMS to your own unique specifications.

After you have unzipped the files the first thing you need to do is create a MySQL database via your hosts cPanel. Take note of the MySQL DB, DB user and password and the host name.

From your unzipped files, rename

• settings.php.default to settings.php.
• dbconnect.php.default under libs folder to dbconnect.php

Upload the files to your server

Next you’ll need to change the permission on the following files (chmod) to 777

• /avatars/user_uploaded
• /backup
• /cache
• /templates
• /templates_c

chmod the next lot of files to 666

• /libs/dbconnect.php
• /libs/lang.conf
• settings.php

chmod to 655

• config.php

Open www.yoursite.com/install/ in your web browser.

1.) Make sure to read the entire page and click continue
at the bottom when finished
2.) Fill out your database name, username, password, host,
and your desired table prefix.
3.) Check that there are no error messages!

Delete the /install folder

chmod 644

• libs/dbconnect.php

Open www.yoursite.com

Use the following details to log in:

Login = god

Password = 12345

And change what’s needed. Don’t forget to change the password as soon as possible to be more secure.

If you click on the “god profile” you can modify your info and also ad an avatar.

Click on Admin to check out the available options. Best is if you add some categories. While you add or edit a category name, click on the red/black colored text.

If you want to change the default administrator username from god to say, admin visit yoursite.com/admin_users.php?mode=edit&user=god

Once a new story is submitted by a user, it will stay unpublished (queued) by default. To publish it, simply click on the small admin links and Admin: Change the status, then Set it to “published” and Yes (will not notify submitter).

That’s it, you have now installed Pligg on your server and the next step you can take is getting familiar with the interface.

The following screen shots are examples on how Pligg can be used:

Below are some ideas on how you can use Pligg:

• social bookmarking submission site
• article voting site
• magazine story submission
• real estate
• videos
• podcasts
• ebooks submission site with votes

And much more. The sky really is your limit here. With all the available themes, add-ons and more, Pligg can be customized till the cows come home.

If you are after Pligg Pro themes (they do cost) you can check out the Pro Pligg page.

Enjoy

Monika

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