As I said in my last blog post, I've started rebuilding Hotaru, so things have been a bit quiet in the forums lately while I work on these changes. Right from the start, I've I wanted to make a system that was easy to understand, easy to make themes for, and easy to develop. I wasn't altogether satisfied with the last version (unreleased 0.9), so I started again to make it better before people start using Hotaru for live websites. So far, the base system is complete and ...
This morning I finished adding the last of the CSRF protection to Hotaru 0.9 and then gave some serious thought to whether or not I'm satisfied with how Hotaru is designed. And you know what? I'm not. The fact is, these "bite-size" plugins of functionality that were supposed to be independent of each other and small enough for a newbie to get their head around, have grown into big, intertwining balls of spaghetti that confuse even me - and I made them! Well, that's ...
This week, my time will be taken up with adding cross-site request forgery protection to all the forms in Hotaru. I have a list here of 22 forms that I should add random, database-stored tokens to in the hope that people can't hack in by duplicating some of the more sensitive forms and directing them at Hotaru sites. I've done 9 forms so far, but those 22 don't include all the admin settings pages for each plugin. I'll have to do those, too! Yawn... what a tedious job. I would much ...
It's still possible that there will be another mini release in the 0.8 series, but right now all attention is on Hotaru 0.9, due before Christmas. There are two main goals for 0.9. First, full HTML and CSS compliance with W3C standards, and second, compatibility with the relatively new PHP 5.3. Along with 0.9, we'll be releasing a new default theme - something a bit more professional than what is running on the demo site at the moment. The good thing about upgrading everything ...
I was looking over some of the old modules from SWCMS and saw the Video Plus module which had been ported from Pligg. Included in it is ThickBox, a module that you can use to overlay the screen with images, video or any other content. Surprisingly, it was dead easy to make a plugin for, especially as JQuery is already bundled with Hotaru. In fact, there's nothing to it at all, other than including a couple of files from the ThickBox site. So once I had that working, I needed something ...
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