Will’s Similiblog

Have also been playing with drigg, a ‘Digg clone’ written as a Drupal (5.x) module suite. Works very much like Pligg, reviewed in my last post. Voting is done using the drupal votingapi, with extra_voting_forms as the interface. In addition to accepting individual submissions, like Pligg, drigg will import rss feeds, and has a very nice feed import interface. The rss import function depends on the default drupal ‘Aggregator’ module, with the addition of some custom code in the drigg module itself. A provided theme gives a Drigg/Pligg-like look & feel.

I had no trouble setting up an installation & getting feeds to import.

My sense is, after playing a bit with both drigg and Pligg, that if a dedicated Digg-like “social-ratings-of-submissions & feed items” site is desired, without the need for added functionality, I’d go with Pligg; if there is reason to integrate this with other functionality that could be provided by other drupal modules, drigg will perform the same tasks quite nearly as well within a drupal installation. The module suite is under active development, and has come into its present state quite quickly, so I’d keep an eye on it.

Currently, I have a site set up as a dedicated drigg installation; I’ll be messing around with integrating this into one portion of a more comprehensive drupal installation, to see how well it might integrate with other drupal functionality. Drigg’s feed import functionality depends on the default drupal ‘aggregator’ module, which does not play well with the very elegant ‘aggregation’ module I’m using on my social learning platform for aggregation of users’ distributed content; so this strange need I feel to aggregate two different types of content separately on my site may leave me in a pickle (perhaps I need to use Drupal’s multisite and multisite_login capability, & create 2 sites with single sign-in, each using the Aggregation module to its own ends, one to handle aggregation of news and 3rd-party submissions with social ratings, and one to handle users’ distributed content with comment-density surfacing of content? - perhaps I’m just nuts).

For drigg in action, see here:
http://www.drigg.org/
or here:
http://www.fsdaily.com/

I’ve been playing around with Pligg, and have a test installation up at http://pligg.similibus.org, to mess around with. A pretty nice out-of-the-box social-ratings-of-submissions (Digg-like) platform.

The user interface for submission of individual items is very straightforward, esp. with the “pligg this page” bookmark function. It’s also possible to import feeds, as administrator - by enabling the optional/included “RSS Importer” plugin. So this is a decent choice for aggregating distributed user-content item-by-item, along with user submission of 3rd party items and administrator-chosen feeds, with promotion by social ratings.

There’s a lot more flexibility (with concurrent complexity) in what can be muckled together in Drupal, but if this does what is needed, it’s an easy and elegant installation. I’m still a bit muddled re how well social ratings will work for surfacing of user-submitted material in an academic community (I’m intrigued with the option of comment density as the surfacing algorithm) - but for surfacing of material submitted from 3rd-party sources, this will do nicely.

Would be great to create easy user db integration / single sign-on capability with other cms’s (moodle, drupal &c.), so’s to be easier to integrate this into a learning management system suite.

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