Five ways to get a Digg/Reddit clone

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.

Rat­ing: 5/10

Tagged as: Digg, Pligg, Social Bookmarking