Drupal developer Tony Mobily has built a new module for Drupal which enables anyone to start up their own Digg clone. You can grab the code and contribute to the project at drigg-code.org, or you can see it in action at drigg.org.
The module allows you to build a link aggregation site powered by user submissions. You can chose from a few different voting schemes, including the "up only" system used by Digg and the "up/down" system used by Reddit. There are comments, tags, categories, user profile pages and everything you'd expect. There's also a "karma" system that works a lot like's Reddit's karma system.
It's a little on the ugly side (Mobily admits it needs a better skin) but all of the functionality is there.
In addition to being a Drupal hacker, Mobily is also the editor in chief of Free Software Magazine. FSM's media liaison Bridget Kulakauskas wrote in to tell us that Tony began working on Drigg when he grew fed up with the lack of a solid open-source solution for building news aggregation sites.
"Digg's software is proprietary and the code is not revealed to the public," she writes. "Pligg was released as a free/open source software CMS (content management system) designed to provide users with a Digg-style site. It has been the only option for web developers wishing to build community-driven democratic sites for the past couple of years, but development and usability problems have plagued Pligg."
And thus Drigg was born. It should be noted that Drupal, the CMS platform upon which the module runs, is an open-source project written in PHP. Drupal is modular in design, so it's highly scalable and you can use it to publish just about anything – a single blog or an entire blog network, a community site, an e-commerce site and so on.
