---
title: "Pligg"
description: "Pligg is an open-source CMS for building Digg-style social news sites. Learn how its community voting system works and what it needs to run."
url: "https://nodea.io/en/glossary/pligg"
lang: "en"
updated: "2026-07-13"
---

# Pligg

> Pligg is an open-source CMS written in PHP for building social news sites where users submit and vote on content. A link's popularity determines its place on the front page.

**Pligg** is an open-source [CMS](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/cms) written in [PHP](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/php), built for creating *social news* sites — portals where the community submits content and decides its visibility through voting. It was popular during the heyday of Digg-style sites.

## How Pligg works

Its principle rests on bottom-up content curation. Registered users submit links to articles with a short description and then cast votes on them. Submissions with the most positive votes graduate from a queue to the front page, where they gain the most attention. All of the mechanics — accounts, votes, comments and publication order — are stored in a [MySQL](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/mysql) database.

The script offered features typical of such portals: topical categories, comments, anti-spam systems and templates and modules for customizing the look and logic of the site. Thanks to its open code, the community produced its own extensions and themes.

## Practical application

Pligg was used mainly to launch niche link aggregators and industry portals driven by community engagement. The voting model let the most interesting content surface without top-down editing, which made it attractive for community projects and [SMO](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/smo) activities.

As a classic PHP-plus-database application, Pligg ran on typical shared hosting or a VPS. It is worth noting that the project is no longer actively developed, so new deployments tend to consider more modern, supported alternatives offering a similar vote-driven publishing model.

A lack of active development also means old Pligg installations may contain unpatched vulnerabilities, so sites still built on the script demand extra caution — environment isolation, an up-to-date PHP version and reliable backups. For new social news projects, solutions with an active community and regular security updates are the safer choice today.

### What was Pligg used for?

Pligg was used to build social news sites and link portals where the community submits articles and a voting system promotes the most popular ones to the front page. The model resembled Digg or Reddit — content was ranked from the bottom up by user votes.

## Related

- [PHP](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/php)
- [MySQL](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/mysql)
- [CMS](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/cms)
- [SMO](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/smo)
- [Hosting](https://nodea.io/en/glossary/hosting)

---

Languages: [pl](https://nodea.pl/pl/slownik-pojec/pligg.md)  
Site index: [llms.txt](https://nodea.io/en/llms.txt)