Five ways to get a Digg/Reddit clone

Posted by multippt

If you love Digging (or redditing) to the point that you simply must have your own personalized “Digg” site, this article is here to help you do that. An added bonus - the full installation steps are in this article as well, so you don’t really need to read the instruction manual to get your Digg clone running.

#1 Pligg - Digg

Pligg is the closest you can ever get to Digg, except perhaps the interface (but you could always make one up right?). Currently the most popular CMS under social bookmarking, Pligg is used numerous entreprening site owners. Pligg also supports anonymous voting, perhaps one element that Digg cannot offer (yet).

The 10 minute install guide to Pligg (assuming you have your web host ready):
1) Download Pligg, install it to where you want it to be. Make these directories writable (CHMOD 777) otherwise some features might not be available: backup, cache, templates, templates_c, avartars
2) Go to the installation page (i.e. http:// yourpliggsite /install/) and follow the instructions on the installer
3) If you done it right, Pligg would be installed within 5 minutes. You can then log in using your own password.
4) Go to the administration panel (link is at the top panel) and browse/tinker with the options available.

While Pligg may be still in beta, it is fairly stable and usable. There might still be some glitches though, but chances are it is fixed with every update. Fortnately, Pligg is in active development and a final release may come out at any time.
Rating: 9/10
Sites using Pligg: Sphinn

#2 Drupal (+ plugins) - Reddit

Drupal is a general Content Management System, but with the addition of some modifications it can emulate Reddit. The Vote Up/Down package allows you to do just that.

Installation:
1) Install Drupal
2) Download the package and install it to the “modules” directory
3) Log into your Drupal install and enable the Voting modules: actions, links, userpoints, views, vote_storylink, vote_up_down, voting_actions, votingapi.
4) Upload node-storylink.tpl.php, template.php (may need to be combined/merged with the existing file if any) files to the theme directory.
5) Disable “Vote widget display” in admin/settings/vote_up_down (if using node-storylink.tpl.php).

Note: This module is discontinued due to inactivity and is not updated for several months, thus no updates are expected.
Rating: 7/10

#3 Corank - Digg, Del.icio.us

A pretty nice Del.icio.us clone, Corank is perhaps a great alternative to the above 2 especially if you do not wish to install anything much. However, there’s only one problem with using Corank - it’s not something that comes out-of-the-box. You’ll need some pretty decent programming skills to make use of the API they provide. However, because this makes use of an API, you need not worry about resource problems. Fortunately, this API is very robust and can do quite a lot of things. In order to access Corank’s API, you need to register an account there. CoRank does not support anonymous voting.

Rating: 7/10

#4 Upwarded - Digg

Now a discontinued project, this would-be Digg clone has fallen out of favour and is released to the public as open-source code. If you are looking for a really, really simple Digg-like CMS, Upwarded would probably be the perfect choice since the files are very easy to customize. Upwarded allows users to vote for articles anonymously. The only drawback is that it doesn’t support user registration.

1) Download and upload the files to a suitable place
2) Run the SQL script in sql.txt (via phpMyAdmin)
3) Create a cronjob (view the readme file provided for further information)

Since this is a discontinued project, it is unlikely that there would be any updates. Nonetheless, the project is fairly complete, and does what it’s suppose to do.

Rating: 6/10

#5 Blinkk - Digg

If the above three are not enough to satisfy your needs, perhaps Blinkk will. Blinkk is the merger between the main Social Bookmarking sites that inspire all. Sadly, this project doesn’t seem to be quite as popular compared to the others.

The open-source project is discontinued a few months ago and was converted into commercial software.