Building A "Digg Clone" Using Pligg And VBulletin: Design & Development

[kbeeveer46]

I saw this story over at digg. Go vote for it to get Pligg in the news

A small design/development firm takes on a big company's website re-design to show off their humorous stories about people being fired at their jobs. Re-designing the site to utilize a "digg" like interface, integrated login with VBulletin forums and a web 2.0 look & feel. If you're looking to work with Pligg or voting like "digg," read this story.

http://www.digg.com/design/Building_...gn_Development

http://www.simplyfired.com/

[newuser]

Hey guys,

That's the site I have been working on for about 2 months and Im happy to say we have finally launch and the site is ready to go. Our blog pretty much explains it all, but I figure I will give you guys a little more insight into what we digg on the pligg side.

P.S. This was all done on an early version of the pligg CMS so Im sure we fixed, changed, or created so things that may now already be in existence. It was simply to hard to implement a working version of the site while upgrading to the newest version of pligg. So we had to pick an install and stick with it. All the custom modules were built by the Media Crumb team.

1) Rewrote the handing of URLS for method 2 to handle more characters and to fix some of the many issues with how clean URLS performed in pligg.

2) Create a custom poll module using Ajax action along with a fully administrative backend to create new polls, save polls, and edit polls.

3) Create a "bridge" for Movable Type that allowed latest 5 blogs to end up on the home page withing their own style.

4) Created a function that allows piece of content (for instance blogs) to be show on and specific page requested on pligg. (Really hard but really worth it.)

5) Create a universal login pass across pligg, vbulliten, and MT as well as 2 different domain names. This was really hard because passing a session from one url to the next was simply a pain in the ass. Instead we found it to be more secure to just keep all login/pass the same but get rid of sessions.

6) Created a "bridge" for vebulliten that allowed for cross posting from specific forums to pligg and back. This means if a user posts in the stories forum in Vbuliten forums, that post is also submitted withing pligg using his Username. The same happens each time a user submits a story to pligg. That story will then also show up in the stories forum on Vbulliten.

7) Custom HTML Tag Content. This module and the follow mod are probably one of the biggest aside from the forum mod. This allows an admin to post ANY type of custom HTML they want above what ever Tag they choose on the site. So users who select a certain tag a lot can be shown a banner, design, message, etc.. for that tag at any time. For example: http://www.simplyfired.com/tag/office+pranks+contest

8) Custom HTML Category Content. Similar to the tag stuff, but instead for categories. So if you want to promote a category with a certain contest, feature, or even theme you can select the cat in admin and then create your own custom HTML for that category. Heck, you could even add a CSS file to change the whole look of the page for that one category or tag.

9) Tagged stories. Since the stories are about jobs lost, user can submit stories along with there the story happened and what position the person held who was fired. This will automatically tag the story with location and job position in green and allow users to automatically search for those jobs on Simply Hired simply by clicking the link.

10) Our own version of media submission. We didn't like how the media modules worked so we built our own. Because the site didn't want upload features we opted to use links instead. Since the world uses youtube we didn't think it would be worth it to re-invent the wheel. Instead you can simply add in your link and the media is submitted. If its an image, it will be re-sized automatically to fit the site. Upon clicking we use lightbox to display the whole image size without leaving the page.

All type of media are also only shown on the stories page. We found that it really broke up the flow of the design to have them appear in-line with other stories.

11) Ton of display changes and mods to templating as well as new template addition based on page.

12) A crap ton of bug fixes and code changes.

If I think of anything else I will be sure to add it here, but Im sure it will take me a while to think up all the changes. In the end we had to do A LOT of optimizing and changes, but the project was a ton of fun. Sorry to all the people that were PM me and the crew for work over these past month. As you can see we were really busy and I should now be able to get back to you all soon. Thanks pligg for all your hard work!

The blog post is below....

http://www.mediacrumb.com/2007/04/20...reds-redesign/

[savant]

1) Rewrote the handing of URLS for method 2 to handle more characters and to fix some of the many issues with how clean URLS performed in pligg.

12) A crap ton of bug fixes and code changes.

I'm sure pligg would benefit from this. and great work guys.

[Simon]

I love the design, looks great!

6) Created a "bridge" for vebulliten that allowed for cross posting from specific forums to pligg and back. This means if a user posts in the stories forum in Vbuliten forums, that post is also submitted withing pligg using his Username. The same happens each time a user submits a story to pligg. That story will then also show up in the stories forum on Vbulliten.

How hard was this brige to create? I've got a similar Pligg / vBulletin / (half way there) WPMU blending, but haven't attempted the "next step" in terms of integrating pligg submissions with the forum (and groups / blogs).

[newuser]

Originally Posted by Simon

I love the design, looks great!


How hard was this brige to create? I've got a similar Pligg / vBulletin / (half way there) WPMU blending, but haven't attempted the "next step" in terms of integrating pligg submissions with the forum (and groups / blogs).

Actually it was quite hard. The reason being that the forum and the site actually live on 2 totally different servers as well as different URLs. So the handling of the data was really a big pain in the butt. You can make it easier on yourself with a cron job a suppose. But we needed to make sure the pligg posting was in real time.

Other then that the issue was making sure the formating all worked on both side. The forum handles formating with BB code and is totally different then pligg. So we ran into a ton of isues with titles and content. We also didnt want to carry over the media into the forum post so we had to strip that HTML and only make a link to the media on the forum post.

[kbeeveer46]

Story is on the front page of Digg now.

[newuser]

Originally Posted by kbeeveer46

Story is on the front page of Digg now.

Thanks kbeeveer46. As always you get a lot of people that bash it without even readying the article. I guess that's digg for you.

[Simon]

What else would the masses have to do if it weren't for bashing things they know little about?

[abcdefgary]

Originally Posted by savant

I'm sure pligg would benefit from this. and great work guys.

I'll second that.

[cryptkeeper]

was just gonna post this , along with: http://www.mediacrumb.com/2007/04/18...cms-of-choice/