Create Your Own Digg Like News Portal

Pligg lets you develop your own news portal with social networking features, wherein news items with maximum votes are automatically moved to the portal's home page

Saturday, August 01, 2009

Print

Comment

Email

Digg

Del.icio.us

Reddit

Twitter

Are you keen on building a news site with features of a typical social networking site? Pligg portal enables users to submit their own content which is then categorized as an 'upcoming story'. Once a story recieves enough number of votes, it is promoted to the main page of the portal automatically. A user can also write a short version of his story and share the same with a group of users. Besides, vistors can comment on a story, and others can rate it. Just as you would expect from a social networking site, Pligg allows users to create their profiles as well as create groups. It also supports private messaging as well as RSS feeds. RSS feeds from other websites can also be used for adding stories on a Pligg portal automatically.

Installing Pligg
You require PHP4 and MySQL 4.0 or later as pre-requisites for installing Pligg. Download the package from pligg.com and copy it to the root of your webserver. Now rename settings.php.default to settings.php, and dbconnect.php.default to dbconnect.php under libs folder. Also create a database for Pligg in MySQL.

Now run the installer by going to localhost/pligg/install (here put the name of your webserver instead of localhost). This will launch the installation wizard, which will ask you to specify settings of your database, ie, database name, username, password, etc. Next, it will ask you to choose the admin account details -admin login name, password, email etc. Once you have created an admin account, Pligg is ready to use. Now you need to delete the /install directory from your webserver and change credentials of /libs/dbconnect.php to 644.

When submitting news, visitors can specify the category and group in which the news should be featured.	As a user submits a news item, it is displayed under Upcoming News. Only after getting sufficient votes it is moved to main portal.

How to use
Once Pligg is installed, it's very simple to use. Before you start posting news, you need to create groups. To create a group, just go to group option on the main menu and then on create a menu. Provide a name for the group and write a description. You would also need to specify group privacy setting i.e public, private or restricted. Next, you need to specify the number of votes required to publish a story. You can also provide email addresses of your friends, whom you would like to invite to this group.

Through Pligg admin interface, you can perform actions such as user mangement, news management, back-up, etc.	In Pligg, you can also configure ratings for the comments posted by the visitors visiting your site.

To post a news, an user needs to register first. Pligg by default comes with re-captcha. Once an user is registered, he can modify his profile. Now if you want to post a news which is already published on some other website, go to 'SUBMIT A NEW STORY' link on the main menu. Provide the URL of the site the story is already published in, write the story title, tags, your own description about the story and specify a category and also the group for the story. Your story will be visible under 'UPCOMING NEWS' menu.

Admin interface
From the admin interface, you can perform tasks like user management, news management, backup etc. To add new modules to your Pligg site, go to modules option at the top of the menu. In the module management page, just click on 'Install'. In admin interface, you can also modify the captcha to be used, by default it supports reCaptcha, WhiteHat Method and Math Question. However, you need to just enable them. From admin interface, you can also change templates and modify SEO settings of Pligg.

Page(s)   1