What is SWCMS?
Social Web CMS (SWCMS) is a mature, full-featured, and open source social news application written in PHP and utilizing a MySQL backend. From the web newbie looking for a simple way to enter the playing field to advanced developers hoping to drive social news to the next level, SWCMS is your best source for full, free, and actively developed social news applications.

SWCMS History.
The origins of SWCMS can be traced back to a Spanish open source application called Meneame founded by Ricardo Galli. Pligg LLC was established by two United States, English-speaking collaborators - Eric Heikkinen (Yankidank) and AshDigg to translate the Meneame project into English and continue to build on the foundation Galli had started. For the next several years work would continue in this manner, with AshDigg serving as the core application developer for Pligg. Unfortunately, due to philosophical and personal differences it was necessary to fork into a separate project. SWCMS was officially formed in July of 2008 and while built upon the same codebase used by Pligg is now developing its own roadmap. SWCMS has already released Beta 1 - the first revision following the Pligg codebase fork - which includes dozens of bug fixes, security patches, and small enhancements.

SWCMS Team:

• Ash (AshDigg) - An experienced PHP developer had for years served as the main development impetus behind the Pligg project. He brings significant expertise and skill to the SWCMS team.
  
• Lincoln Hawks (LincolnHawks) - Owner of the respected SocialCMSBuzz web community - a primary source for information on web-based content management systems, LincolnHawks has played an important role in finding security vulnerabilities within the codebase, developing new modifications and templates, as well as helping drive open communications around the ecosystem.
  
• Jamey Boje (GraphicsGuru) - SWCMS Creative Director. An extremely talented graphic designer Boje's regular employment is as a Mozilla Freelance Employee. On the side he tirelessly works to assist a variety of open source projects and is now committed to ensuring SWCMS lacks nothing in the design department. He's also known for his popular FoxieWire social news site covering Firefox and based on SWCMS.
  
• David Mackey (davemackey) - Founder of Informed Networker, a social news website for Information Technology Professionals, Dave has a strong background in systems administration and ASP.NET/MSSQL application development. Dave provides significant wordsmithing and business skills to the SWCMS team as well as an open source ethic which involves contributing numerous features and code fixes back into the open source ecosystem.
  

Why SWCMS?

• Experience - SWCMS has brought together some extremely bright minds and will be actively working to expand the SWCMS team.
• Features - SWCMS offers a robust, mature, and feature filled social news content management system that can compete with the best solutions currently available from other vendors.
• Dedication - The SWCMS team is fully dedicated to the success of SWCMS. Each team member has a vested interested in SWCMS, personally running custom sites based on the core SWCMS code.
• Openness - SWCMS is eager to establish open and clear communications on all aspects of development and the team including financial allocations.