After the mis-happenings with newscloud platform, I have decided to take a look into Pligg. It is based purely on digg and has customisable interface and supports multiple skins. I was really impressed. Although there are not too much modules, the system is quite capable, interface is nice. After looking into code, I was confirmed that it is very nicely built – there is proper separation between designs, seo and templates.
Still, there are couple of points that could be better:
1. Title formating rules are fixed – one needs to look in 10+ files to change it.
2. Configuration editing is hard to understand when there is no difference between clickable and unclickable area (except the mouse-over).
3. The url rewrite does not work without manual changing .htaccess in some cases.
4. Default template is not valid + it tends to use php inserts, what is kinda not nice.
Anyway, I was really impressed and I like that software.
UPDATE
After a while, we noticed a lot more issues with PLIGG.
1) Php inserts kinda suck. Lots of things were made as php inserts apparently and changing code was not nice task for programmers, worst cases are when they generate smarty content from inside php insert in smarty.
2) Pligg is database ineffective! You have to fix lot of things to make pligg stop querying same data over and over when page loads. There are up to 30 or so unnecessary queries on page load. So it wont scale nicely.
Although Pligg is still a possible consideration, I would recommend in investing on its rewrite.
You are right but Pligg has both good and bad thing. I was running it and I find issues with broken code in admin panel. Language file had issues after I upgraded to pligg 9.5. Scalability is issue. I eventually thank one company called Moonrank USA (http://www.moonrnak.com) who made a better rewrite of the code.