WELCOME!
Greetings!
Perhaps you're one of those people who use Digg or Drupal or some other similar CMS regularly, and know what this is all about. If so, you'll need no introduction to Pligg. If, on the other hand, you simply clicked on the link "stories" without the faintest idea of what to expect (this was my state when I started this portal), then you will want to read this description to get at least a hazy idea of what this section of the portal does.
What is Pligg?
This is answered by the two paragraphs that were placed by default in the first story that was already in the front page when the portal was started:
Pligg is Web 2.0 Content Management System. The main features that make Pligg unique are collaborative bookmarking, social networking, folksonomy and blogging.
Each of the Stories links, pligg content units, has a vote button, URL and optionally a short description of news. Here Visitors are supplier, consumer and judge of the content. Every visitor has right and freedom to vote and veto any news item. So, Pligg gives your visitors a reason to come back to your site by making them decide on the site's content and giving them the chance to build a social network. To learn more about Pligg visit the official Pligg site: http://www.pligg.com/
But what are we going to do with it? Don't we already have a forum?
Hmm.. Yes, that's a very pertinent question. It is indeed true that most of the needs of a community can be met with a phpBB. So why are we using this section of the portal?
The answer to that lies in the essential difference between the phpBB and the CMSes like Digg. Basically, posting on a phpBB is like saying, "Hey, here's an interesting thing for us to discuss about," whereas bookmarking a web-page on Pligg is like saying, "Hey, I found this smashing piece of news. Don't you think its great, too?"
Thus bookmarking a site in Pligg is like trying to gauge whether the community shares your enthusiasm. Pligg is better used for news that is presently extermely exciting, but is bound to grow stale pretty quickly. On the other hand, forum posts are generally about topics that can retain their relevance over a longer period of time, and which merit more in-depth discussion and lengthy reply posts.
Pligg offers a facility to post replies, too, but they are usually short statements of agreement, or disagreement, since it is not expected that the average CMS user will have the patience to read through lengthy reply posts.
In short,
Thus it works like this:
1. You find a great web-page/news-item.
2. You link to it on Pligg.
3. The story is listed under "Unpublished"
4. The others read your story.
5. If they like it, they vote for it. (Which each user can do once and only once by clicking that big orange circle to the left of the story title.)
6. Once the story gets more than a specific number of votes (I think this value is set to three by default in the configuration file, which, I believe, is written in PHP.) the story is pushed to the front page and is labeled as "Published".
How do I submit stories to Pligg?
One way to do this in three easy steps is to click the link "Submit a new story" in the sidebar to the left of this page.
So, the next time you find a news story about something that you think will be of interest to this community, you are welcome to Pligg it.
Happy Pligging!
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