I have been experimenting with the open source social bookmarking application Social Web CMS for a little over a week. SWCMS is a Pligg fork. Last year, I had worked with Pligg trying to modify it for K12 use.
In order to make a social bookmarking application suitable for many in the k12 environment, content and comments need to be moderated. With Pligg, I controlled the content by hacking all “Upcoming News” links out of the template; hence, newly submitted stories could not be viewed unless published by an admin. Unfortunately, I never found a way to moderate comments, so I again hacked the template to eliminate the ability to comment altogether. In addition, it is desirable to control users by eliminating public registration. Again, all registration links had to be deleted along with the register.php file.
When I started exploring SWCMS, I wanted to find similar controls. Any of the solutions mentioned for Pligg would work here; however SWCMS has a few more options.
Developer Nick Ramsay created the Submission Approval mod that holds a new user’s first submission in moderation until reviewed and approved by an admin. I made a small change to one of the files—submission_approval_main.php around line 133:
if($num_submitted > 1 ) {
Changed to:
if($num_submitted > 1000000 ) {
Effectively changing all posts to moderated. I made similar changes to his comment approval plugin. As with Pligg, registration can be hacked out of the template and register.php can be removed.
The ability to enable and moderate comments is a big plus. Moderating submissions work equally well whether I hack out upcoming news. One drawback to the Submission Approval Mod method is that once a submission is approved, it also needs to be moved from queue to publish. I tried setting admin–>config–>voting to 1 vote to publish, and admin–>config–> submit to automatically vote for a submitted story, but that did not eliminate the additional step. I will continue to look for a way to streamline the process.
SWCMS joins the ranks of useful software that can be used in the K12 setting. I plan to experiment with social bookmarking with my students in the near future. If anyone is interested, I will be glad to provide my modifications.
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