The much loved Digg-style CMS, Pligg, has announced that it is for sale. Many website owners have installed the Pligg CMS to build web communities, to share stories and videos. As the Pligg code is currently open source, meaning that everyone is free to download it, and tinker with it, to make their own perfect web community, there is concern that a new management may focus more on commercials and turn Pligg into a closed source Content Management System. Pligg state: “Pligg is open source and will remain open source, however if a buyer were to invest enough money we would be willing to consider writing fresh code as originally intended for Pligg 2.0. “. So it is possible that the new Pligg will become closed source, and the current version of Pligg will remain open source, but will possibly stagnate and become redundant, unless a new group of volunteers take the reins.
Pligg give the main reason for their decision to sell as “we have outgrown the foundation that we started with over a year and a half ago”. And as a Pligg user, this is a very valid point, as one of Pligg’s downfalls has been a lack of user support and documentation. Currently the only support for Pligg is via the forum, and although there are many highly knowledgeable moderators and forum members, sometimes problems can go unresolved, which can be very frustrating for users.
Pligg has also, like any other software, experienced many bugs in the code, and although these are ironed out in later releases, people running old versions currently have to manually upload and rebuild their Pligg installation on each new release. Hopefully the new Pligg will have to option to automatically update the software online, and avoid the problems that many users have experienced in the past when updating their installations. A more professional approach will certainly be a good thing for webmasters, so fingers crossed that the sale goes through smoothly and the new management continue with the good work that has been done, and provide a more robust code, improved functionality and better support and documentation for what is possibly one of the best open source content management systems currently on the market.
