Social bookmarking/news sites have been a phenomenon in 2007 showing unprecedented growth on the web this year. Pligg since their beta v9 series was released have become the the most popular option for starting your own Social News site, could this all be about to change with the release of a drupal based system titled Drigg.
Lots of webmasters who had the incline to start their own social news site most probably searched the web looking for a CMS system that would launch their project and were left with little other choice but to use Pligg. Not many alternatives to Pligg exist at least with the features pligg carries as standard and ease of install, it’s not ideal for the first time webmaster but with a little time and patience you can have a pligg site running in around one hour.
As popular and as usable as the Pligg CMS system is anyone who has used Pligg or looked at the code will realise that it has some downsides. The Pligg Beta 9 code base is notoriously messy along with the MYSQL DB not being optimized slows the system down for most users, reports can be found on various sites about the resources Pligg consumes along with scalability problems for larger sites running Pligg.
Social interaction features in Pligg are also limited to comments and a simple messaging system for users that if i am being honest is not that impressive, thats about all your interaction features on Pligg covered. Pligg has no forum integration or modules to speak of that add to interaction between users. The lack of features of this type can leave pligg users feeling isolated from each other instead of building a community that can interact, keep tabs on what their friends are doing, social network with fellow minded members etc.
So what does Drigg bring to the table, well to begin with drigg is based on the Druapl CMS system one of the best and most popular CMS systems available on the web. Drupal has a extensive library of modules that allow webmasters to build a simple website to a fully featured social networking community. The developer base that contributes to drupal is also enormous compared to Pliggs 4 -5 die hard contributors that have created a few good modules for the pligg project.
If you take everything that Pligg can do and add that to Drupal you end up with a pretty damn fine system with endless possibilities for features, growth and scalability.
Some Features From Drigg
- Flexible voting. The module allows you to pick from 4 different voting forms: select box, select box with negative votes only, up/down, up only (ala Digg)
- Easy, easy theming. The example theme provided is based on zen. Drigg provides bot the original zen theme, and the “modified” version. It’s very easy to spot the differences. To create your own theme, you can either customise the zen theme, or pick another starting theme and apply the differences (for example, you will need to place the voting form for scoops and comments)
- STRONG separation between code and theme. Unlike other systems, Drigg separates the module’s logic and the presentation very carefully.
- Plays well with Drupal. You can set Drigg as your home page, or you can decide not to do that. This means that Drigg will play well with your existing web sites.
- Good code, easy bug fixing. Feel free to browse through the source: it’s neat, extremely well commented, and tidy. THismeans that finding bugs is easier.
- Flexible voting. You can have N different voting forms for the same scoop. After voting, the others will grey out. This means for example that you can have a UP/DOWN form for a scoop, and then underneath a “select - negative values only” voting form for the same scoop.
- Flexible as hell. Drigg is just amazingly flexible. While it has fully working defaults, it allows you to customise it immensely.
- The power of Drupal. Drupal is a fantastic CMS. Once the system is setup, you will be able to install and use other Drupal modules as you like
- Automatic votingYou can set a number of users as the “bosses”, and other users as “slaves”. The system will make sure that the “slaves” assign a random number of votes to the nodes voted by the “bosses”. This will make it easier to startup your site without becoming schizophrenic
- Automatic role assignment.You can assign roles to people according to their karma amount, and (more importantly) to their karma ranking.
Drigg is a pretty laden packed system and is highly oprtimezed so should provide good speed, http://www.fsdaily.com have only this week changed from Pligg to Drigg, if you want to see Drigg running in a live enviroment visit fsdaily and have a look around 
Drigg also comes with a Pligg importer tool which when released will allow exising pligg webmasters to move their entire database from their pligg site to the drigg system and retain users, stories, tags, etc. Tony from fsdaily is the man who has coded Drigg along wih a few other helpers after becoming disallusioned with the Pligg codebase.
We have heard the phrase “DiggKiller” touted around the web this year everytime a new socialnews site launches, Could the new phrase for 2008 be “PliggKiller” only time will tell but with the future of pligg in doubt after the announced sale and development speeds seeming slow of late it might just be.
Drigg should be released in mid to late december for public use under the GNU/GPL license.
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This post was written by:
Lincoln - who has written 163 posts on Social CMS Buzz.
Owner of Social CMS Buzz and a fan of all things social and design related.
Drupal is a great option, but the site fsdaily.com doesn’t utilize the power of the Drupal CMS engine. Another fact to consider is that Drupal is immensely time consuming to work with and if you’re not a more than proficient coder/programmer, don’t go there as the freelancers will eat you alive with their fees. Joomla is the best option for this. There is a pligg type script available now and a new version will have an integration soon with community builder. However, it is time the net moved on from the standard’s set by Digg and Stumble and make the social networking component part of a greater site as the market will soon get bored with a proliferation of these type of sites soon. Netscape (now propellor.com) is a perfect example of this integration and it works well. Another website to watch is http://www.ecobites.com as I read their propellor.com type integration is about to be launched.