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Mods make SWCMS suitable for K12

February 16, 2009 in Social Networking, Technology, open source | 2 comments

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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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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