How I Created My Own Digg Clone
Recently we were looking for a CMS with digg like voting system. Purpose wasn’t to create a digg clone, though it required digg like functionalities, for example, voting, most popular topics etc. As I expected, there are plenty of open source solutions; from a basic script to complete CMS. However, after evaluating few solutions, we decided to use Drupal with a voting plugin.
Drupal is a very robust and scalable CMS platform. Although, It does not provide digg like functionalities out of the box but there exists few modules that can add these functionalities. Advantage of Drupal is that there are plenty of modules, themes, and templates available and it is easier to make your own if needed. Also, enough help is available in the form of documentation, user forums and communities.
As I mentioned, Drupal is not an out of the box solution and requires some work to make it like digg. Here is a voting plug-in along with few other which enabled voting on Drupal. A very nice setup guides are here and here. However, be prepared to learn Drupal if you decided to take this route. If not, read on other solutions below.
Out-of-the-Box Solutions
Those who want a quicker solution, there are other exiting solution which resemble digg right out of the box. But IMO, they are not as scalable and robust. Here is a short list.
Pligg – Resembles lot to digg but IMO, extremely buggy, un-scalable, hard coded and non-modular. It might be usable for a small internal application but a definite NO-NO for a live application.
PHPDugg – IMO, simpler and better than Pligg but still buggy. Again, not scalable.
Upwarded – Source code of the dead website Upwarded.com. Don’t expect further development or any support.
A nice article covering many more solutions is here. Remember that, any generic solution is unlikely to meet all your needs. Let me know if you have come across any better solution worth trying.
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I would like to hear your ideas, critics, suggestions or feedback on this post. Thanks for leaving your reply.Comments
I’m interested in doing this too. What did you pick?