Question: Setting up a digg-like feature

madman — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 12:44:31 -0800

I need to set up a community site that also has a Digg-like community news section, and am trying to find open source packages that will do the job. I looked at Pligg, but am wary of using it (reasons inside). I wonder if Drupal will work. Can you folks shed some light?

I am working on a project that has a section that will follow a Digg-like formula: user-contributed headlines with users voting for which headlines will make it to the front page.

But there's one major difference in our requirement. For legal reasons (libel and such), all headlines and summaries need to be approved by moderators/admins before they can be seen in the queue by users to vote. (For instance, a headline like "[famous person] is a cheat" can't be allowed to be published anywhere that users can see - UK libel laws are stricter, and the company sponsoring the project is based there.)

As far as I can tell, Pligg can't do this part (I asked on their forums but haven't got a response.)

I'm also wary of using Pligg because there is hardly any documentation, and it seems less an open source "community project" than a couple of guys who work on this only on Fridays and Saturdays (one of the admins said so in the forums). The admin interface is pretty primitive too.

I've been told by many people that Drupal is something I should consider, since it's well-documented and there's a large community around it. Can Drupal handle something like this? Are there modules or plugins that will provide a Digg-like voting feature and allow admins to approve them first?

If not, is there something else you would recommend for this purpose? (Externally hosted solutions like Ning are out; this needs to be hosted on our own servers.)

By: kamelhoecker

kamelhoecker — Tue, 07 Nov 2006 18:48:53 -0800

drupal provides a nice content-management infrastructure (user registration, roles, permissions, pages/nodes, etc.).

there are lots of modules available, but no out-of-the-box digg-like solution. so, yes, this is defintely doable in drupal, but you would need to roll it yourself. You would need to a module that would use a new table ("diggs") which would store a node id, user id and whether the dig +1 or -1.

then you need to create the UI to digg the story, and the code to show the diggs for each story (node).

e.g.

select count(1) FROM diggs where nid = 12

conceptually, this is basic stuff. Drupal saves you from having to write a whole content-management system, but you still need to invest quite a bit of time learning "the drupal way" before you can start hacking it to do what you want.

Alternately, pay a drupal developer to write you a digg module. i'm sure it wouldn't cost more than 1-2k.

as for the admin publishing feature - i believe a simple publishing workflow is available out of the box.

Comments on: Setting up a digg-like feature

Question: Setting up a digg-like feature

By: kamelhoecker