best CMS for discussion/collaboration site?

February 10, 2008 7:50 PM

What's a good CMS to make a slashdot/kuro5hin/plastic.com/digg clone?

The features I want the site to ultimately have are:
- users
- moderation/karma system
- queue for articles
- ajax/digg-style voting goodness
- fast

Scoop seems good, but is there something else I should be looking into?

posted by philosophistry to computers & internet (16 comments total)

The source code for Slashdot is open source (site seems to be down at the moment). Pligg is an open source clone of Digg's CMS.

The new D2 discussion system at Slashdot offers an AJAX-based comment moderation system. I don't know if that has made its way into slashcode yet or not.
posted by jedicus at 7:55 PM on February 10, 2008

scoop (what runs kuro5hin) is also open source. Both are ok, but you'll need to be running your own server.
posted by singingfish at 8:19 PM on February 10, 2008

Kuro5hin uses scoop, also open source.
posted by rhizome at 8:21 PM on February 10, 2008

I've actually run a site with scoop, and it totally blows. I mean, unless it's been totally rewritten since 1999. working with the design in scoop was awful. I gather that most of the layout is done in CSS now, but based on my experience I'd stay away.
posted by delmoi at 8:30 PM on February 10, 2008

(actually I was probably using scoop in 2000-2001)
posted by delmoi at 8:31 PM on February 10, 2008

You can make a slashdot clone with the default install of phpnuke. Its pretty much designed to be a slashdot clone in php with forums. Easy admin interface too.
posted by damn dirty ape at 11:01 PM on February 10, 2008

There's a Digg clone module for Drupal: http://drupal.org/project/drigg

Other Drupal modules will do the other things you list.
posted by stephthegeek at 11:59 PM on February 10, 2008

I think Plastic uses Slashdot's Slashcode too.
posted by zippy at 3:04 AM on February 11, 2008

Seconding Drupal and its bajillion modules.
posted by Brian Puccio at 4:36 AM on February 11, 2008

There is Phpdug (digg clone). Super easy to setup, great support, very easy to modify, and *Free*
posted by bleucube at 7:45 AM on February 11, 2008

Drupal has modules to do it, but Drupal's core competency out of the box is multi-user blog.

While many modules exist that purport to do what you want, the time it takes to get them working together and look the way you want will be non-trivial. Also, the programming skill on third-party modules (which comprise all but about 20 modules that make up Drupal) is questionable. In contrast, core modules are generally put together very well.

If you want a clone out of the box AND are NOT interested in adding new functionality or doing any programming on your own I would look closely at slashcode for a slashdot clone and pligg for a digg clone. Pligg was not very good about a year an a half ago, but I believe it has come a loooong way. I have no personal experience with slashcode, but if it does what it says on the box, I imagine it'll work pretty well for a slashdot clone.

If you are interested in adding features or highly customizing the look and feel, look at Drupal, particularly Drupal 6*, if the modules you want to install are available for it but understand that there is a steep learning curve.

* Drupal 5 development is probably going to die out this year, because the form API etc has been completely redone, thus, a module developer would likely have to backport any modules they write for 6 -- which probably ain't going to happen, seeing as how few of them actually finish the modules for a single release, much less backport it. Drupal 6 is officially in beta right now, but will probably be released very very soon, and to be honest, after you install a couple third-party modules your drupal install is effectively in beta anyways.
posted by fishfucker at 11:21 AM on February 11, 2008

I work with the Movable Type team, and you can grab the free, open source version to do most of this right out of the box. If you want to get even further into the community features you've mentioned, we have the Community Solution, which expands the rating/digg-style features and enables more detailed member profiles. Feel free to drop me a line if I can help.
posted by anildash at 6:10 PM on February 11, 2008

Drupal has modules to do it, but Drupal's core competency out of the box is multi-user blog.

Actually, it's not as good at that as Movable Type, Wordpress with multiple users, or some of the other very focused tools. What Drupal is really good at, at least in my opinion, is building sites where you need some sort of 'pool' of different kinds of content, displayed in a variety of ways around the site, and want multiple people to be able to contribute/edit it. While multi-user blogging fits into that mix, if that's all you want to do there are specific more focused tools that are better at just that.

I wrote a couple of the key modules for Drupal that are being used to build Digg-esque sites (VotingAPI and Voting Actions), and they can do the trick when needed but probably take a bit of finessing. There's a Digg-Clone-In-A-Box package that someone has put together using Drupal called 'Drigg', but I haven't had a chance to look at it. I'm biased: I've been working with Drupal for quite a while and love it, but I wouldn't tell you to pick it up if you're looking for a 'turn the key and go' solution. It's like a box full of lego bricks, and it'll be frustrating if you just want something that does stuff without clicking bits together for a while.

* Drupal 5 development is probably going to die out this year, because the form API etc has been completely redone, thus, a module developer would likely have to backport any modules they write for 6

<geek> As one of the people who actually rewrote FormAPI, I can say pretty conclusively that this isn't the case. There are some serious under the hood changes to make AJAX and AHAH based forms easier to build, but from a developer's perspective the guts of working with forms hasn't changed much at all. The new DB Schema abstraction layer is actually a bigger change. </geek>

That said, for anyone building a reasonably complex site, I'd honestly recommend sticking to Drupal 5 for now -- the module ecosystem is much better developed and it will remain that way for months, most likely.
posted by verb at 10:01 AM on February 15, 2008

As one of the people who actually rewrote FormAPI, I can say pretty conclusively that this isn't the case. There are some serious under the hood changes to make AJAX and AHAH based forms easier to build, but from a developer's perspective the guts of working with forms hasn't changed much at all. The new DB Schema abstraction layer is actually a bigger change.

Thanks for the correction -- I was wrong and I apologize for blowing this completely. I was thinking of the hook_menu implementation. I do think most of the changes ARE for the better, but the API has changed and it was necessary to do a little bit of relearning.


That said, for anyone building a reasonably complex site, I'd honestly recommend sticking to Drupal 5 for now -- the module ecosystem is much better developed and it will remain that way for months, most likely.

I guess my reasoning for recommending Drupal 6 is that there's been significant performance improvements and other developer-friendly changes. While the third-party modules are less common, I forget to consider this because I typically am writing my own modules in most cases. So you're exactly right; if you're planning on relying on existing modules, D5 is going to be better for at least half-a-year. That said, is anyone going to write new modules for D5? I'm sure trying to avoid it, if possible. There's a lot of modules for D5 that are 80% complete that I'm guessing are now never going to get finished -- personally, if I was dependent on other people implementing functionality for me, I'd want to get the latest version possible, so I could have the most up-to-date functionality.

Anyways, I need to be less publicly cranky about Drupal. It really is a very good platform for many tasks; I just have experienced a number of frustrating moments with it (where I'm cursing the fact that no-one saw fit to include X or Y in core, or that module Z does A but not B, or usually does A, C, D, E and F, where I only want A and B.)
posted by fishfucker at 10:37 AM on February 15, 2008

Anyways, I need to be less publicly cranky about Drupal. It really is a very good platform for many tasks; I just have experienced a number of frustrating moments with it (where I'm cursing the fact that no-one saw fit to include X or Y in core, or that module Z does A but not B, or usually does A, C, D, E and F, where I only want A and B.)

Well... the flip side of that is that Drupal's proponents also tend to be people who 'drank the kool-aid', so to speak, and invested the time in getting to know its quirks. it never hurts the community to get some cold water and realize that there are lots of rough edges and issues encounter by people who come to it with fresh eyes or specific requirements.

In annnny case, sorry for the derail. Drupal-talk is always a sure way to bring me out of the woodwork. ;)
posted by verb at 12:43 PM on February 15, 2008

yeah, I think the biggest issue drupal faces in trying to achieve widespread adoptionis that the backend management is not pretty out-of-the-box, where pretty in this case means wordpress. After working exclusively with Drupal for 9 months, I installed a couple wordpress blogs and was impressed by the simplicity and usability of the backend UI. It's come a really long way from the first few versions. The Wordpress post editor is an interface I am able to have even my least technical co-workers use compentently. Admittedly, a blog is about the simpliest content type you can get (title, content), but file uploading and other options are handled sooo beautifully. File management in particular is one of the more lacking aspects of Drupal's UI.

It looks like some steps have been taken to improve usability in drupal 6, specifically during the install process (although I was disappointed to find that the install process won't work with the -- admittedly extremely low -- default 8M mem limit of php.ini -- this is a pretty big defect to user adoption, IMHO). I look forward to seeing even more interface improvements in Drupal 7. That's our biggest issue with the site we built: all the functionality is there, but there were a lot of obstacles to creating a sensible and friendly UI (the new additions to the form api may help a little here).

anyways, always nice to see the drupal core devs willing to chat about drupal. I spent some time in #drupal when I first started developing with drupal but I felt it was pretty insular and closed off to folks who were unknown within the drupal community, which is frustrating (although i guess ignoring the noobs is pretty much the golden rule of irc). it also seems too often that there's a 'we're not doing this because i said so' aspect that stifles discussion in some of the feature suggestion threads. I'll grant you all of these are based on somewhat isolated experiences (I pretty much stick to reading the API and looking at existing code, because I've found the drupal.org site to be un-navigable), but that's the view from the outside.
posted by fishfucker at 4:05 PM on February 15, 2008