FeedTheBull.com - Financial and Stock Market News (PLIGG Conversion)
webdevel - January 2, 2008 - 05:21
I'm just finishing up http://www.feedthebull.com
The site was originally built using the PLIGG cms and after three months I have finally finished completely rebuilding the entire site with many enhancements in Drupal. As far as I know this is one of the only DIGG-like sites out there built in Drupal.
Please let me know your thoughts and suggestions for improvements! Thanks!
Share your knowledge
Hi webdevel,
One word: Awesome! 3 mths is really a short time frame.
Care to share what your modules did you use to develop it and what are the challenges involved?
- yeeloon
Same questions - lol
I must have taken too long drooling over the site.
Some Info on FeedTheBull.com
Well going into this project I really didn't know much about Drupal so the learning curve was steep. Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot of good information on module development and a lot of already available modules aren't very well documented so that was definitely the biggest challenge for me. A close second was the database conversion from PLIGG to Drupal. This took 6 scripts and turned out to be pretty complicated. If anyone is interested in converting a PLIGG site to Drupal just hit me up and I might be able to share some of these scripts with you.
The modules I am using are:
(Core)
Contact
Drupal
Help
Menu
Profile
Tracker
(Other)
CCK (for vested interest)
Node Import (used to help convert the PLIGG database)
FTB Stocks (a custom module I wrote to add the stock ticker to nodes)
FTB URLs (a custom module I wrote to add URLs to nodes)
FTB Landing Page (you'll notice after registration it takes you to a "special offers" page. I wrote a small module to do this and pass some of the registration info to the advertiser for targeted advertising)
PrivateMsg
Node Profile
Forward
Meta Tags
Pathauto
Recent Changes
Search 404
Spam
User Import (used to help convert the PLIGG database)
Buddylist
Captcha
FeedBurner
Tagadelic
Userpoints
Views
Vote up/down (heavily modified)
Voting Actions
Several of the modules above and even some of the core modules required a little modification to get them to work the way I wanted them to.
Let me know if you have any specific questions!
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting - High-end Web and eCommerce Development
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
This site is impressive!
This site is impressive!
I'd love to see an extensive write-up on how it was put together. Anything you'd like to share on how it was developed would be great.
What modules did you use?
Are you using any custom modules?
What exactly makes this site more DIGG-like than other Drupal sites with voting?
Any special challenges in implementing this site? If so, how did you overcome them?
More "HOW" :-)
Thanks!
See the list above for my list of modules.
There are three fairly simple custom modules and I'm looking to work with or hire a developer (anyone?) to build two more. We need a "bury" feature to hide articles and self-regulate spam (like on DIGG http://digg.com/). Also we need an external vote button module that people can add to their own sites. There has been some recent talk about this on the forums ( http://drupal.org/node/199190 ) but I don't think it's done yet and we need this ASAP.
True there are some other attempts at digg-like sites that are built in Drupal and the new Drigg module will help make this easier but none of the sites I have seen yet were built very well and are very "slapped together" and don't function very well.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting - High-end Web and eCommerce Development
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
Any suggestions?
Does anyone have any suggestions to functionality or modules that I can add to FeedTheBull to make it better?
One thing I am trying to do is that when you view the full node I want "Related Stories" to show up in the node or directly below it (and above comments). I've looked at a few of the modules but they put this into a block that I can only get to show up at the very bottom of the page. I was thinking I could just modify one of those modules to have the results show up within the node content or is there a better way?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting - High-end Web and eCommerce Development
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
lol
Oh yeah, and I overcame the challenges by working all the time and not having a life the past three months :-)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting - High-end Web and eCommerce Development
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
I work with a graphic artist
I work with a graphic artist that did all the front end work so that helped a lot as well! There is no way the site would look anything like it does without him skinning it to look pretty :)
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting - High-end Web and eCommerce Development
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
nice site
Great work so far, I'll be watching this.
How did you make the "Top Sites" section?
Top Sites
I cheated a little with topsites and just used a skinned version of this:
http://www.aardvarktopsitesphp.com/
Eventually I would like to integrate it more transparently into Drupal.
Sorry i cant help with tech
Sorry i cant help with tech advice, but your site is terrific, and its nice and full of content without looking cluttered. are most of those contributors on staff?
I saw that you have a toolbar! thats dam& cool! i followed up an found conduit.com, EXCELLENT idea which i will definitely be taking advantage of. thanks.
Contributers
We actually only have one guy that contributes occasionally. There are roughly 40 other active users on the site (not affiliated with us) right now that contribute most of the content.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
Embeddable javascript widgets
webdevel,
How do you developed the widget on this page http://www.feedthebull.com/tools?
I was searching high and low around Drupal's forum, and I'm pretty stump at not finding why there aren't any embeddable widgets modules out there? Can you share how is it done?
- yeeloon
Widgets
Well the toolbar is done though this site: http://www.conduit.com/
The Stock Ticker Widget I custom coded and isn't really part of Drupal either. Basically I just designed the look in Photoshop, then cut that up and made it into an HTML/CSS page using static text for the different properties and inline css styles (ie: as opposed to using an external style sheet), finally I replaced the static text with PHP code which is pulling live data from the Yahoo Finance API. At this point it was ready to be included in an iFrame and the iFrame code could be posted for other people to use on their own sites.
Did that help?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
Impressive
Impressive!
real nice work!
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Drupal Theme Garden
Drupal Hosting Article
Not quite the first to use Drupal
Sorry to say, but your site is not quite the first to convert from Pligg to Drupal. ;-)
Value Investing News made the switch back in October 2006. I've known about your site for quite some time, so I'm surprised to hear that you abandoned Pligg. I'm very impressed you were able to pull off the conversion after using Pligg for so long. Did you end up losing any data in the transfer?
If you are ever in the mood to collaborate, we should consider swapping ideas and maybe even code. We are in somewhat different niches (your site seems to attract more traders, mine more value investors), so I think we don't really compete. I use many of the same modules that you do, so I'm sure we can learn from each other. Please contact me if you are interested.
----------------
Value Investing Blog
Value Investing News
Pligg -> Drupal
I'll send you a PM later but just to keep some of this open to the Drupal community:
First off, good job with the site! We must both have been following the Pligg model pretty close because feature wise the sites are quite similar.
As far as data loss... not really. The only thing we lost were passwords since PLIGG uses a different encryption scheme. I probably could have modified Drupal but I didn't feel like it. Fortunately the user import module resent a "reactivation" email to all our users and I modified the login page to point people to the "forgot password" section in case they didn't get that email. As far as I know this change didn't create problems for anyone. Other than that, the scripts I wrote were able to map the database over pretty accurately. The only script left to do is tags which are pretty complicated in Drupal but hopefully once these dang server issues (see below) stop I'll have time to finish that script.
The other big issue so far has been URLs. With the new system a lot of the URLs have changed so I installed the Search 404 Module to direct people straight to the content they were looking for. This brought another issue, it KILLED our server!!! The last week and a half we have been plagued with out of memory errors, mysql to many connection errors....... we are on a VPS form GoDaddy and tonight I'm going to be switching the site to a pretty beefy dedicated machine from SuperBHosting. I really wish I could take the search 404 module off permanently (I removed it temporarily yesterday) but we have hundreds if not thousands of legacy links floating around out there so we need to keep it.
At what point did you switch to Drupal? How did you go about converting your data?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting
http://www.aycomconsulting.com
Re: Pligg -> Drupal
Thanks for answering my questions.
In regard to when I switched to Drupal, I did it October of 2006. I had been running Pligg as a subdomain of my blog before that for a few months, right after the first working versions of pligg were available. I soon realized that Pligg had a lot of limitations and that the developers had a lot to learn. I really worried that Pligg would not be scalable.
I didn't have the technical skills to transfer the data from my old site to a new Drupal install on my domain. Therefore, I created my Drupal install from scratch and pointed my pligg users to the new domain of my site. It was less than ideal, but I don't believe I lost many users.
Re:
Good choice making that switch! I found that PLIGG was super easy for minor hacks but anything beyond that was such a pain in the ass! Also the PLIGG code is written pretty poorly in my opinion. It's good for what it does, quick DIGG clones, but anything beyond a clone, like our sites, and it quickly becomes very limiting. We have tons of new features we want to implement in the next month or so, and most are going to be custom. Hopefully I'll be able to give back to the awesome Drupal community when I can.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
AYCOM Consulting
Very Impressive
Not a big fan of the stock market, myself, but Im very impressed with your site, and curious on a couple things. First, what did you not like in pligg, and what caused you to switch? Also, what features are you lacking that pligg had built in? Had you heard of the drigg module for drupal when you were migrating? I'm currently running a drigg site, and am curious as to how you got your "Recent Activity" functionality. It seems very similar to the live feature of pligg, as well as some of the stuff coming out of digg labs. I'd really like to be able to integrate that, as well as the external vote button you've been after, to my drigg install, and wondering if you've had any luck with that. Thanks in advance, and great work.
Silvano
How do you sort stories?
The site is just a great work!
Could you please share, how was implemented the sorting of the popular content? I mean, on front page there are some stories, sorted by popularity - it obviously depends on the votes and the day it was published. But how do you decide which story is more popular?
change the title font .. too
change the title font .. too bold, it's difficult to read.