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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