Pragyan CMS

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Pragyan CMS is a simple and fast multiuser CMS or Content Management System to organize collaborative web-content. Pragyan CMS is a free and open source software. It allows very fine user & group permissions and provides an interface for quickly generating pages like articles, forms, quizzes, forums, gallery, etc. It can be used for publishing content on the World Wide Web and intranet. It is completely written in PHP, and provides support for MySQL databases.
Being a modular CMS, it comes pre-installed with several modules, with each page being a module of some type like form, quiz, article, forum, gallery, etc. It has an integrated search engine which is powered by Sphider and has third-party plugins like PDF converter for converting pages into PDF, Google Maps for quickly converting locations into maps and CKEditor for editing articles.
Pragyan CMS is created by the present students and alumni of NIT Trichy, all of them belonging to the NIT Trichy's Webteam (also known as Delta Force within the institute). Pragyan CMS is used every year ,since its first release, for creating the NIT Trichy's main website as well as the Pragyan technical festival of NIT Trichy. It has also been used for many departmental symposiums of NIT Trichy.
History and Present
The idea of Pragyan CMS was conceived by Parijat Mukherjee and other members of the of NIT Trichy. Due to the launch of Pragyan in 2005 which comprised of, among others, many online events with huge participation, it was decided to use a CMS to maintain such a big event's website and manage users. However, none of the existing CMS at that time could serve the purpose and hence the webteam took the task of writing a custom-made CMS from scratch. Subsequently, the CMS was named as "Pragyan" CMS.
The version 1 of Pragyan CMS was released unofficially and used in the Pragyan 2007 website. Due to its success, it was decided to use the CMS for the NIT Trichy's main website also. However, many shortcomings were recognized in the v1 and Sahil Ahuja along with other members of the 2008 batch webteam decided to rewrite the CMS from scratch, which led to the creation of v2. The v2 was subsequently used in the NIT Trichy's main website as well as the Pragyan 2008 website. Since v2, there have been many official releases until v2.6.4 which was released on SourceForge.net on 16th April 2009. The v2.6.4 is currently the latest stable release of Pragyan CMS and is deployed in the present NIT Trichy's main website as well as the Pragyan 2009 and 2010 websites.
In spite of its success, the v2.6.4 posed several security threats like File Inclusion Vulnerabilities and Multiple SQL Injection Vulnerabilities.
The existence of the critical security gaps in the implementation of Pragyan CMS v2.6.4 and other shortcomings, motivated the present webteam of NIT Trichy to come up with a more secure, user-friendly and powerful CMS which led to the creation of v3. Currently, the v3 is in its alpha release stage. The beta release is expected to arrive very soon. The project is led by Abhishek Shrivastava of 2011 batch webteam and it now comprises of a number of developers mostly from the 2012 batch webteam, working on the tickets posted in the official Pragyan CMS bug-tracker on SourceForge. All the reported security vulnerabilities in v2.6.4 are fixed along with many other bugs and added features.
Modules
Due to the modular design of Pragyan CMS, the core libraries, the individual modules and the templates are completely independent of each other. In the latest v3 alpha release, the following modules exists :
* Article : For creating normal pages with images, videos, flash, Google maps and normal textual content. It comes with CKEditor for better editing.
* Form : For creating forms like registration form and feedback form.
* Quiz : For creating a quiz that supports multiple-choice, single-choice, and subjective questions with individual marking and weightage system.
* Gallery : For creating a gallery of images. Image ratings and images view counts are currently in progress.
* Forum : For creating a forum where users can interact by posting and creating new threads. It supports sticky threads, forum access control, moderation of posts and like-unlike buttons for the individual posts.
* News : For creating a page where News or updates can be put up and shown accordingly. This module automatically generates the RSS feeds for the page so that other websites or applications can take the feed from it.
* Sitemap : This kind of module displays the sitemap of the complete website. Good for navigational purposes.
* SQL Query : This module is advanced and allows the privileged users to write their own SQL queries and the result is automatically shown on the page. A SQL Helper is provided in this module to quickly navigate through the database from the CMS itself. Since this module gives direct access to the database, it should be very carefully used.
* Link : This module is a part of the menu and its simply a link to one of the existing pages of Pragyan CMS.
* External Link : This module is also a part of the menu and is an external link to a different website.
Upcoming modules
* Poll : This will allow the creation of polls along with vote statistics display.
* QAOS : This module is designed for use by the Pragyan's QAOS team that needs to create an hierarchy of Core members, Events, Managers and coordinators, in a fashion to easily identify who's responsible for who. This also allows rating of people based on their work. This module is being designed in a generic way such that it can be extended for any other purpose also which requires tree-like hierarchy and member ratings.
Versions
Pragyan v2.5.4 was released on March 18, 2008. The v2.5.4 was followed by many minor releases until the v2.5.14 which was released on April 24, 2008.
Pragyan v2.6.1 was released on April 26, 2008 followed by two more releases until v2.6.3 on August 12, 2008.
Pragyan v2.6.4 was released on April 16, 2009. This is the most recent stable release of Pragyan CMS v2, however it still has the security vulnerabilities which are fixed only in v3 onwards.
Pragyan v3 pre-alpha was released on May 23, 2010. The security vulnerabilities were fixed along with improvements in the existing modules.
Pragyan v3 alpha was released on June 4, 2010. Many new features like Template installation, PDF plugin, ckEditor, Sphider search engine, etc were added. This is the most recent release and is available for testing purposes.
Deployment
Pragyan CMS can be installed manually from the source code on a system running a web server which supports PHP applications and MySQL databases. The README file which comes along with the source-code has full instructions for installation.
Pragyan CMS uses URL Rewriting which requires the mod_rewrite module to be installed and enabled in the web server. Many installation problems that occur are mostly because the above module is not correctly installed.
Examples
These are examples of websites based on the Pragyan CMS:
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*NIT Trichy

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See Also

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