New developments in FOSS bookmarking

February 8, 2009 in Social Networking, Technology, open source | 5 comments

It has been about a year since I began considering Pligg, an open source social bookmarking server application, for K12 education. In that time several events have taken place in the world of open source social bookmarking applications. Social Web CMS forked from Pligg, and Reddit released its code as open source.

Having discovered this, naturally I wanted to give them a whirl. I went to the Reddit site to find the code. Unfortunately, Reddit does not have a tarball package, nor could I find a subversion repository. Installation instructions were only given for Mac OSX, Ubuntu, and FreeBSD. Perhaps I will learn how to install it on my CentOS server, but for now it is a no go. It’s a shame that there are no clear instructions on how  to install it on common LAMP servers such as mine.

Social Web CMS, on the other hand, was easy to install with both zipped code packages and Subversion available. Having installed SWCMS, I didn’t seem many differences between it and Pligg. This makes sense since it is fairly recent fork, plus there appears to be use of SWCMS code in the newer version of Pligg. I am not really interested in the understandable difficulties between the fork and the original developers. I’ve seen enough open source drama of late.

Communicating with SWCMS developer, Nick Ramsey, I discovered that they started by patching security holes in Pligg and are developing a module system that reduces the need to hack core files, following the lead of WordPress. To that end, they have already developed a free module store in the administrative backend allowing the installation of modules without the typical process of downloading  and unpacking zip files, the transferring them to the server via ftp. In addition, all SWCMS mods are free. They also plan to simplify the templating system making them easier to modify. Pligg and SWCMS templates are no longer interchangeable.

Nick has created a submission approval plugin for SWCMS that I have changed for use in the K12 educational setting. His only moderates the first submission; whereas, I modified it to moderate all submissions. He also has a plugin that disables comments. While I need to have moderated comments, I could run a school bookmarking site without comments. Hearing this, Nick tweeted that he is moving comment moderation up to the top of his list of plugins.

With moderation of submissions and comments, Social Web CMS moves to the front of my choices for a k12 school social bookmarking application. As it is, with my hack, it is already viable if one disables comments. The developers and support community appear robust, responsive, and enthusiatic.

I see great potential for social bookmarking in the K12 setting. It can allow teachers to bookmark Internet resources in a format familiar to students, and allow students to add materials they find on their own. This resource could become even more powerful if schools or  groups of people working in common subject areas could collaborate.

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  1. amuzihqzi’s avatar

    amuzihqzi on February 9, 2009 at 2:14 pm

    The irony of SWCMS accusing Pligg of lifting 2 lines of code from their subversion since SWCMS lifted the entire thing from Pligg. I’ve been using the new version of pligg and it’s by far more advanced than SWCMS ever wished they could be. A complete security overhaul, database speed improvements, and a bunch of new features. I also think it should be noted that more people downloaded the new version of Pligg in the first 24 hours than SWCMS had for an entire year. The truth is SWCMS is nothing more than an outdated, unsecured beta version of pligg. I had hope for the SWCMS fork but they dropped the ball and the real coders all stayed with pligg.

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  2. Steve’s avatar

    Steve on February 9, 2009 at 4:09 pm

    Open source is open source and anyone can grab anyone else’s code, so this is a wash by me. I’ll bet most forks have a back and forth over the code.

    I’m game for a fair compare and contrast of Pligg and SWCMS, but let’s get more specific. Is one more secure than the other? Then tell me how. If one has more and better features, then lay it out. Who are the real coders that stayed and which ones went? In essence, please substantiate what you are saying.

    What I do know is that I am finding some of the tools I need to make this work for a K12 setting on the SWCMS side and Nick has offered to build the other one I need, comment moderation. I haven’t been able to find these moderation capabilities in Pligg. If I am wrong, set me straight.

    But do me a favor first. If you are a known entity in the Pligg/SWCMS world, how about using a name that everyone will recognize?

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  3. Tradenet’s avatar

    Tradenet on February 10, 2009 at 1:10 pm

    That’s why I love open source….but I do hate the drama.

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  4. dennyhalim.com’s avatar

    dennyhalim.com on June 1, 2009 at 3:43 am

    reddit use git for the repository.
    git is similar to svn.

    this one line will fetch all reddit sourcecode:
    git clone http://code.reddit.com/repo/reddit.git

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  5. Nick’s avatar

    Nick on March 2, 2010 at 11:58 pm

    Update: When development on Social Web CMS started to dry up, I offered to rewrite the whole thing from scratch. Rather than hang existing users out to dry, we agreed that this was the way to go because we could implement all the features that were difficult to do when bound to the original Pligg framework, and provide an upgrade path for existing users.

    In February 2010, the reinvented SWCMS, called “Hotaru CMS”, came out of beta. Unlike its predecessor, it’s not limited to social bookmarking. The entire CMS is plugin-powered, including post submission, comments, user registration and management sections for users, posts and comments. Everything is PHP-based and plugins and themes share more in common with WordPress than Pligg. As I write this, there are over 50 plugins already developed, and not just by me. Hotaru is well documented and we’ve had eight different people use our tutorials to make plugins so far.

    I remember Steve needing more control over submitted content in order to use it in a K12 setting. Hotaru CMS has a permissions system which enables admins to turn functions on and off for individual users at any time. There are also over half a dozen predefined user “roles”, each with their own set of editable permissions. The admin can choose which role to assign to new members, including “undermod” which puts all submitted content into a moderation queue.

    Alternatively, you could allow new users to submit content off the bat, but put their first X number of posts and comments into moderation. There are also options for posting frequency and quantity. Further options for notifying admins, super moderators or moderators of submitted content by email, make Hotaru well-suited to the classroom environment.

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