Exploring Kigg – Alternative to Pligg

Pligg is a very powerful application which is used to create Digg or DotNetKicks styled websites. But the software is in PHP version and many .NET developers may not like PHP. Hence, few developers have developed a new application code named KiGG which is a web 2.0 style social news web application developed using Microsoft supported technologies.

The core feature of KiGG is that the application is developed using ASP.NET Modal View Controller (MVC). Moreover, developers have integrated Linq To SQL, Entity Framework, Enterprise Library, Unity and jQuery.

You can either make use of SQL Server 2005, SQL Server 2008 or MySQL 5.x. MySQL works with windows servers. KiGG also provides automatic thumbnail generation using PageGlimpse or WebSnapr and also enables you to protect SPAM using Akismet, TypePad and Defensio.

You can also enable Captcha using reCaptcha service and also display images as Gravatar. Kigg has built-in URL shrinking services and all the submitted URLs will either become http://tinyurl.com or http://is.gd.

Even though I liked the features of KiGG I was unable to install it. I had contacted support but they are not much helpful. There is a discussion forum at the project site where develoeprs can post queries.

I am again going to install KiGG as I am very eager to test drive the product. I know that KiGG involves more work than installing Pligg but it will be a new learning experience for those develoeprs who want to delve deep into ASP.NET MVC.