From the Venture Skills blog today, there's a tutorial that aims to help you develop a Digg-like site without any of the messy programming that can be involved - with a little help from Drupal.

Digg is a user content driven site, users submit links to article and sites that interest them and other uses either give it the thumbs up or the thumbs down. The most popular sites get onto the front page and can have literally thousands of hits this is reffered to as the Digg effect. We are going to go step by step how you can develop such a site using Drupal CMS which is available from drupal.org if your unfamiliar with Drupal we have an overview here.

The real key to it all comes in with the plugins you install into your Drupal setup:

• Vote Up/Down module
• Links module
• Voting API
• Actions
• Voting Actions
• CRE recommendation

They walk you through the set up of Drupal first (screenshots show a Windows environment, but it can be any supported OS) before going into the admin for it and installing the plugins.

This article is just the first part in the series - check out part two and part three for the rest of the installation.