Pligg is a web application that allows you to submit an article that will be reviewed by other users of the site and will be promoted, based on popularity, to the main page.

Pligg has been compared to Digg, Drigg (the drupal version of digg). All of these applications allow your sites content to be published and promoted dependent on the popularity and votes on articles.

When a user submits a news article it will be placed in the "unpublished" area until it gains sufficient votes to be promoted to the main page.

We downloaded and installed Pligg today for the first time. After the install we faced two errors

settings.php not found
dbconnect.php not found

We then had to go into the file manager and rename two files

settings.php.default -> settings.php

and in the /libs folder

dbconnect.php.default -> dbconnect.php

Once these changes had been made installation was successful and we were ready to begin finding out what pligg is all about.

The next task was finding something other then the default template. You can find 50+ Free templates at Pligg2u.com

Our favourite was experience, although we have yet to successfully install it.

Installing a template is "easy"

1. Download the template file from the internet
2. Upload and extract the zip file to your templates directory where pligg is installed.
3. From your pligg admin panel click on configure link - template and double click on current theme name (default is yget). Change the name to the folder you uploaded into /templates

Having read through some of the forums on pligg it seems that theme development for pligg is one of it's biggest hassles. On our first installation we didn't have a problem, but then wanted to move the site to a different location so as not to have a long url

e.g. pligg.webgeek2point0.info/pliggversion9.90/

It seems the move has disabled our ability to modify the themes. We are still pushing buttons trying to figure out why. Of course an easy solution would be to cloak the url with a co.cc

As Web Geek 2.0 continues to play with Pligg, we will keep you updated on the strengths and weaknesses. We also hope to be able to compare pligg and drigg. The thought of a drupal version has us excited.

If you have any tips for us, especially with theme development please Contact us!