A lot of people ask us what software Tip’d runs on; actually, even more commonly, people just assume we use Pligg. Well we don’t!
In fact, Tip’d runs on Social Web CMS, which is (in my opinion) a great choice if you’re building a social news site (even over Pligg or Drigg). True, Tip’d has a lot of custom code, courtesy of our awesome developer Damon (and our webmaster Jimbo), so if you use SWCMS you’re not going to get every feature Tip’d has right off the bat (although we’ve “given back” some of our lovely features as modules).
But you will get a lot with SWCMS. Here are the advantages it holds over competing open source social media software:
- Security: I know competing projects have had a lot of problems with spam, database security, sites being hacked, and then the security patches being very slow to appear. SWCMS has proven to be very secure, and it gets security patches regularly.
- Extensibility: There are a lot of great modules for SWCMS, and a ton more are currently being developed by the community.
- Price: Yeah it’s free!
- Usability: On the front end–meaning submitting stories, commenting, voting–the software just works. Across all browsers.
- Customization: You have the ability to tweak nearly any variable online through the web admin (without getting into the guts of the code, if you’re a dummy like me
) - Long term viability: The SWCMS developer community is growing, and smart folks are involved. This is always a worry with any open source project, so rest assured the project is in good hands, and is not being ignored following the release of 1.0.
Now if you’re thinking of launching your own social news site, I should throw in two caveats:
- You’ll need a geek: Yes, SWCMS is great, but it ain’t WordPress–you’ll either need a good developer or some decent programming experience yourself, to get the most out of it.
- The software won’t get you users: The vast majority of social news sites probably don’t get over 100 user registrations (hint: they fail to achieve critical mass). So let me tell you from experience, building a usable, pretty, niche social news site is one thing, but getting 3,000 people to register and use it regularly is probably a lot harder than you’re anticipating. Not impossible by any means, but most people will fail!
Anyway, that’s my honest review of SWCMS. I love it and Tip’d owes to it a lot of the success we’ve achieved! Check out Social Web CMS now.
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{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
When you have Muhammad Saleem in your team is not that hard to get users
…he being a power Digger.
The problem is that not too many people have something like that in their teams…