NetFxCafe

Advice for using Pligg

This is a quick post highlighting some lessons learned after working with Pligg, the open source digg clone, for over a year now.

If you are considering using Pligg, I would offer the following:

(Note: this post is based on my experience with Pligg versions 9.9.0 and earlier)

Be ready to roll up your sleeves - or, in other words, it is still not a 1.0 release

Things will go wrong at some point. What goes wrong and how it goes wrong will depend largely on any number of factors, including your members, your web host, and the type of content you are trying to place inside of pligg - but rest assured, running this system will certainly provide you with more than enough opportunity to roll up your sleeves and dig into how it works.

The Pligg forum has lots of great information, but has not been easy for me to search. Google usually finds stuff faster.

The good news is that the code is pretty solid. If you have a passing knowledge of php and mysql, you should be able to figure a few things out and make things work.

But keep in mind:

• There are some things that you still need to do directly in MySq - like really remove stories and users.
• You will likely need to delete the cache at some point - so make sure you have easy access to your web hosting file system and are comfortable working with it.

Check your site daily, at a minimum

Building on the first bit of advice, I would say that because things can and will go wrong, and probably in an unpredictable way - be sure to check your site daily, or find a reliable service that can check your site for you.

For example, I logged in today to find that not a single page of my pligg site was working - this has happened before. Not 100% of the cause, but after a little searching, I recalled - oh, yeah, delete the cache.

The error showed up in the browser like this:

“Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 94371840 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 93587786 bytes) in /home/.moppy/myusername/mydomain.com/libs/ez_sql_core.php on line 374″

Here’s the link on the pligg forum that reminded me - oh yeah - delete the cache.

And so I proceeded to delete the templates cache (which itself will sometimes fix things), to no avail - because this is not THE cache, yeah, right, OK - delete THE cache.

Well, you get the point. You should know how pligg is set up and how to troubleshoot.

Deleting the cache resolved the problem. Not entirely sure what causes it, but I did have a lot of links added over night, so maybe some sort of buffer or limit gets triggered or surpassed.

Be ready for the SPAM

I am not aware of any online system that is immune to this plague. Pligg is no different. I am sure there are automated systems that are targeting Pligg.

Pligg does have some built in spam filtering features, but from my experience, it does not work anywhere near as well as the stuff that is built into or for WordPress, for example. And - last time I enabled it, it caused a great deal of sluggishness with the story submission process - so I was afraid it would scare off my legitimate users.

What a catch-22 I have now. Allow the spam and try to keep up with it manually - which is a losing battle, and the more spam that gets through, the more a turn off that is to my users…. OR, turn on the spam filtering stuff, and slow down the whole process, and maybe turn away important submissions?

Well, I am sure there are other choices, and I am still thinking about it, and searching.

Despite the gotchas - Pligg is still a great solution

Although I do want to provide some realistic expectations and food for thought to anyone that may be considering giving pligg a run, I do not want to downplay what a great and fun system this is to work with.

It has a tremendous amount of features built into it, is relatively easy to install, is amazingly configurable, and is an all around great system.

As with any solution - your experience will largely be a result of your going in expectations. If you are armed with the knowledge of what I have tried to lay out here, then I believe you are likely to have a better experience in the long run.

~ ~ ~

Find this helpful? Think I am crazy? I would be thrilled to hear back via e-mail or comments about others experience using pligg - especially as it relates to the points I explained here.