Many website owners including ourselves chose the Pligg CMS system to create social news websites or to add digg like features to our existing sites. Since the latest incarnation of the pligg system was released back on 1st January 2008 Pligg has seen very little development if any? What does this mean for the Pligg Open Source project and more importantly it’s loyal user base?

Pligg is undoubtedly the most popular php system on the web for creating social voting sites like digg.com, thousands of people including myself have placed their confidence in Pligg to start our very own social news / voting based websites. Has this confidence been misplaced though?

Back in January 2008 when v9.9.0 of the Pligg system was released the general feeling in the community was excitement, v9.9.0 made some great improvements on previous versions of Pligg and was the most stable to date after you applied some minor bug fixes. Since then however the project seems to have lost momentum, users and traffic. Check Pligg Alexa Traffic.

Our suspicions that something wasn’t right at pligg surfaced after a tip off from pligg user catchpen back in April 2008 revealing the fact that the Pligg SVN hadn’t been developed since 12th Feburary. It would later be revealed in May 2008 by pligg developer ChuckRoast when answering some questions put to the pligg team by InformedNetworker owner Dave Mackay that the pligg SVN had in fact been moved from Sourceforge to a new location. ChuckRoast also stated that he could at that time not reveal the location of the SVN to the community, as of today the community still don’t know where the new SVN is located and no information on the subject has been made available anywhere at the Official Pligg website.

Looking today at the Pligg sourceforge SVN it has been laying dormant for over five months now as the image below clearly shows.

Around the same time It was reported that the SVN hadn’t been developed  Pliggs lead devloper Ashdigg was rarely active at the pligg forums, looking at AshDigg’s forum profile today Ashdigg has currently not visited pligg since 05-26-2008 09:17 PM which might go someway to explain the lack of noticable development.

It’s now nearly eight months on from when v9.9.0 was released and pligg community members are still very much in the dark as to the progress of the project. Looking around the pligg forums today it’s clear that the project has lost momentum probably due to the lack of development and support, lots of questions lay unanswered with only really two Mods doing all the work.

In the past few months pligg has said that development is still continuing and tried to dispel or write off these type of articles as simply vicious rumors that development has ground to a halt, the fact’s would seem to speak a different story however. It was said by ChuckRoast on 14th June 2008 in response to our pligged v9.9.1 release that the latest BETA was already in the hands of selected testers, so we can expect a release of that BETA soon then?.

The Pligg development team actually seem to be their own worst enemy by not communicating any information to the community, but’s, if’s and maybes are the norm in replies. Maybe if pligg took the time once per week to make a blog post updating the community on what’s happening with the project all pliggers would feel far more reasured.

So whats really going on with pligg? i for one have no clue but i would love the developers to at the very least release some accurate information to put pligg users minds at ease or are we simply not even worth that little amount of effort?.

Opensource is all about collaboration and sharing and many pligg members have contributed to the project, it’s just a pity the Pligg Team can’t share any information with it’s loyal members the same way it’s user base willingly share code and ideas with Pligg.

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