For the last 2 weeks I have been working on the code for release of Hotaru CMS v.1.5.0
As commented in the alpha and alpha2 version a number of things have already been fixed up which prevented Hotaru CMS 1.4.2 from running smoothly on later versions of PHP. A number of core libraries were also updated.
Since then, I have been working on the admin UI and its functionality, as well as fixing up a few styling issues on the user side for basic themes.
I have also been testing the auto-updater for plugins / themes / core and it is coming along nicely
A number of plugins have also been updated and released in the forums.
As part of the v.1.5.0 release I want to relaunch the hotaruplugins site so we can all find the many great Hotaru CMS plugins available. At last count there were over 100.
I will be releasing the v.1.5.0 beta very soon and expect that you can try it out on sites to give feedback. If all goes well, we should be able to get a final release version out soon. Auto update may not be fully tested by then, but it is very close and will be coming soon.
A few people have commented about having a "Group" function in Hotaru CMS and I am planning how we can do that. It will likely be a v.1.6.0 or 1.7.0 feature but it is something worth exploring. I am thinking the "Groups" would work in a similar fashion to Flickr more than say Facebook, but am willing to hear from others what they want.
I have been away this weekend, cycling around Lake Biwa in Japan. It was 160km in total but the course was mainly flat and easy to navigate. Here are a few photos for you to enjoy while you think about ideas for how Hotaru CMS can improve and grow. Also, if you have any friends who want to make themes or plugins for Hotaru CMS let us know. We are happy to talk to all who want to help.
Originally Posted by shibuya246
The Basics (webserver, php, database, ide)
First things first, get XAMPP for Windows and install it following the instructions. Make sure that everything works nicely by visiting http://localhost/ with your browser.
I like having the htdocs folder outside the XAMPP installation folder. The default is C:\XAMPP\htdocs\ see instructions on how to move it somewhere else.
Proceed to getting Netbeans for PHP and install that too.
More involved stuff (xdebug,svn)
Next thing you'll want to do is download the Xdebug extension that is appropriate for your setup and configure the php.ini of your installation to load it and have it cooperating with Netbeans.
Netbeans can also interact with SVN very well and I use it a lot myself. It is just that TortoiseSVN is more feature complete. For doing simple checkouts of the SVN repozitory the Netbeans SVN module is fine as it stands. Nevertheless if you want to have more power in your hands as far as SVN is concerned, get TortoiseSVN and follow the instructions on the wiki on how to get the source from the project's SVN. Bare in mind that the development right now is happening in the /branches/1.5 branch not the /trunk as mentioned in the instructions. This will create a folder with the latest revision of the files that are in the development.
Make sure that you checkout HotaruCMS sources in the folder that your XAMPP installation is serving files from.
Now visit you http://localhost/ again and try installing your HotaruCMS from that folder you just checked out. Finger's crossed everything will go smooth.
Go into Netbeans and from the menu choose File->New Project... and choose a PHP project from existing sources. Point the Sources folder field to the folder you have the SVN checkout of HotaruCMS.
Make sure to have Netbeans save the data for this project outside of that folder by checking the Put Netbeans metadata in a separate directory and choosing a location for them. In the next page of the Project setup wizard, make sure that the Project URL path is correct and click on Finish. Now you have a HotaruCMS ready for development.
Extra stuff (javascript, css)
For the last part... do get Firefox if you don't have it already, and install the Firebug extension.
References
Here is the list of software discussed so far:
- Netbeans for PHP as an IDE
- XAMPP includes the Apache 2.2, PHP 5.2.x, MySQL 5+ stack
- Xdebug (for debugging through Netbeans)
- Firefox + Firebug (for debugging Javascript)
- TortoiseSVN for SVN interaction
- Disgsby + Skype for communication with other team members
Ohloh is a free public directory of open source software and people.
Ohloh is a wiki, and anyone is welcome to join our community and add new projects to our directory, or to make corrections to existing directory pages. This public review makes Ohloh one of the largest, most accurate, and up-to-date software directories available..
Ohloh is not a forge -- we do not host open source projects in the traditional sense. Ohloh is a directory, a community, and an analytics service. We use the data from our directory to create historical reports about the changing demographics of the open source world.
The Ohloh offers some features that can't be easily ignored:
- Nice micro-communication between developement team.
- Releases and downloads listing and management.
- Links to the project.
- Source metrics
- Project News Feeds
- and then some....
Hotaru is listed on Ohloh.net as of yesterday, pump that "I USE THIS" button!. ]]>
The default usergroups are Admin, Supermod, Moderator, Member, Undermod, Pending, Suspended, Banned, Killspammed and Unregistered. Plugins assign permissions to each usergroup, and you can edit them for individual users or entire usergroups.
That alone is pretty awesome, but the next version of Hotaru, coupled with User Manager, will add another level of user domination thanks to my latest experiment, custom usergroups.
The custom usergroups feature is nothing special to look at, but under the hood, it's a mighty powerful tool. To use it, you would go to the Edit Default Permissions page of User Manager and click "Manage custom usergroups...". A drop-down box will give you two choices: "Create new usergroup" or "Remove custom usergroup", as shown below:
When you create a new usergroup, you can choose a default user role to base the initial permissions on. When you want to delete a custom usergroup, you can choose which role to assign to users in the group you're deleting. Any users assigned to an existing group automatically adopt the permissions of the group they are joining.
Custom usergroups open up all manner of possibilities. You could create a team of mini-moderators, a watchlist of problem users, a group of paying members with special privileges, etc, etc...
Of course, to get the most out of custom user groups, I suggest you pick up a PHP for Absolute Beginners book, read the Hotaru documentation, follow the plugin case studies and learn how to add permissions to your own custom plugins. Be the master of your own website! ;) ]]>
The most significant changes are deep in the core code where shibuya246 has made some fantastic progress on a multi-site feature that will enable admins to run multiple Hotaru sites from a single installation. While the bulk of the coding has been completed in 1.4, it's unlikely the "Multi-Site Manager" plugin will be released until later to give us ample time to test the system with live 1.4 sites.
One cosmetic change in Hotaru 1.4 is a new default theme. Lately I've been using 960.gs a lot, so I decided to convert the default theme from YUI to 960, and change its appearance so it looks much more like the social bookmarking demo than the drab, gray theme we've suffered since last year.
One small feature in Hotaru 1.4 which should appeal to theme designers is the ability to specify the "fall-back" theme. Currently, if Hotaru is looking for a template and can't find it in your theme, it falls back on the templates in the default theme. In 1.4, you can create your own "base" theme and use it as the fall back for all your custom themes.
Why would you want to do this? Imagine you want to sell a range of Hotaru premium themes. Instead of making separate themes and duplicating the same code in each one, you could just put all the common files in your base theme and let your other themes use them. The base theme might include your favorite category bar, tabbed sidebar boxes, ad spaces, CSS fixes for plugins, and all the other juicy stuff. Your main themes would merely be "skins" that give your base theme a unique look. As long as the end user has your base theme uploaded, they can use any of your other themes.
The image below shows my "NR Base" theme on the left, and its extension, "Luciola Red" on the right.
Expect a beta thread to open in the next week or two for Hotaru 1.4. ]]>
Hotaru CMS is an open source social bookmarking platform written in PHP. It's just another open source Digg clone, similar to Pligg.
HotaruCMS is another content management script serves news submitting and acts just like Digg. Hotaru CMS is a Digg clone script supported with themes and plugin. In short, Hotaru CMS is also known to be Pligg’s fork.
Lately, I've been working on some demo sites to show that Hotaru is not just a social bookmarking script, but a flexible content management system.
There are three main demos so far: Social Bookmarking, Magazine and Journals, with the home page used as an example of a Static site. Go take a look:
http://hotarucms.org/demos/
We all know about Social Bookmarking, but I like the Journals demo a lot because it shows Hotaru being used for something completely different, kind of a group blogging site. Of course, Journals can be used as a sub-section of other sites, too.
Magazine on the other hand is a straight swap for the Bookmarking plugin. The demo is put together with these (forthcoming) plugins:
Magazine - a stripped down Bookmarking plugin, i.e. no filters (Latest, Upcoming, Best of..., etc.).
Image Upload - a new plugin (coming soon) for uploading and attaching a photo to each post.
Tim Thumb - a new plugin to create thumbnails for uploaded images.
Author Select - handy if people send you articles via email which you (as the admin) submit on their behalf.
Random Avatars - shows random avatars on each page. Great for automated or demo sites.
Article submission is done with the Submit plugin combined with the Submit No Links plugin.
Hopefully I'll be able to add more sites like these to show Hotaru's flexibility in the future. Funnily enough, epoch is already brainstorming the possibilities here. ]]>
June 18th marked one year since work began on Hotaru CMS. I was talking with Alan (shibuya) about whether this means Hotaru is one-year old, and we both agreed that it isn't - that would be a year after Hotaru was first released, not when coding started. Even still, I'm very happy that development hasn't slowed down one bit in the last 12 months.
In fact, June 23rd saw the 2,000th commit to our SVN repository on Assembla. Two thousand commits in a single year shows just how busy we've been. To make a comparison with other CMSs, Wordpress has made 15,000 commits, Elgg has made over 6,500, and Pligg has 2,023. While it's the content of each code revision that really matters, I do think this proves our dedication to the platform.
Currently, we are working away on Hotaru 1.4, laying the foundation for creating and managing multiple sites from a single Hotaru installation so there's plenty to look forward to and it's only been four months since our first public release! ]]>
The main areas we're working on are installation, speed and plugin independence. Believe it or not, but BloggerTools no longer uses SB Base! :eek:
Here are the listed goals for this milestone:
CORE
- Implement smartLoader [Done]
- Apply smartCache to Comment class methods [Done]
- Add additional indexes to database tables [Done]
- Reworked install/upgrade script [Done]
- Fixes for setHome, Widgets and IncludeOnce [Done]
- Implement plugin update notification [I think Done]
- Rework plugin hook checks with an array instead of cached DB queries [Done]
- Shorten getUserBasic by moving user settings and permissions into a getUser function [Done]
- Improve use of caching and queries on the Plugin Management page [Done]
- Experimental work for multi-site potential [in progress]
PLUGINS
- Remove overly-strict dependencies on other plugins [Done for some]
- Breakup SB Base into 3 smaller plugins: Bookmarking, Post RSS and Archive [Done]
- Update *all* plugins for above change. Specifically: [DONE ALL]
* Change all sb_base_theme_index_top functions into theme_index_top
* Remove "Requires: sb_base" or replace with "Requires: bookmarking 0.1"
* Remove "sb_base_" from all pluginHook("sb_base_ etc") lines
* Replace "sb_base" language items with "bookmarking"
- Update all plugins that call getUserBasic to use getUser if settings and permissions are necessary [I think Done]
I wish I could say the upgrade will be easy, but I'm afraid the removal of SB Base means some template and language updates will be needed, and a lot of plugin upgrades. I've already updated dozens of plugins including all the plugin pack ones and still have more to do. I'm sure I'll miss a few so let me know if you use any obscure ones.
We hope to make a beta version available next week for testing. Feel free to ask any questions. ]]>
If a User page, show user posts,
If a Category page show category posts,
If a Tags page, show tag posts,
If a Search page, show search results,
Etc.
Nice and logical, right?
Wrong. The problem was that even though we knew the page name, we didn't know whether to show popular, upcoming or latest posts unless the SB Base plugin had run first. Often, you'd have to juggle the order of plugins until you got it working. The solution at the time was to change all those plugins to use a new hook: sb_base_theme_index_top which was put in SB Base itself, forcing them to run after SB Base has determined the kind of posts page.
Clever, eh?
No, not really, because that led all the plugins to require SB Base.... which is where we are at with Hotaru 1.2.
This evening, I've been going through some of the main plugins, removing all references to SB Base so that they can be used for other kinds of websites, too, not only social bookmarking. But doing this without reviving the old plugin order puzzles has again been tricky.
For my current test site, I've removed SB Base completely, but divided its functions over three plugins: Bookmarking, Post RSS and Archive. The solution I've come up with to the above problem is quite elegant, with just a touch of hackiness:
PHP Code:
/**
* theme_index_top
*/
public function theme_index_top($h)
{
// check if this is for popular, upcoming, latest posts or other...
$this->determinePage($h);
// run all other theme_index_top functions except this one...
$h->pluginHook('theme_index_top', '', array(), array('bookmarking'));
// we've now checked all the other plugins and know what to do, so...
$this->finalizePage($h);
// don't run anymore "theme_index_top" functions...
return "skip";
}
I need to do a lot more testing, but I think this is the key for successful communication between plugins and the "base" plugin, without tying them all up together. ]]>
When I started building Hotaru almost a year ago, I wanted to...
1. Make it open ended, not limited to social bookmarking like our predecessor (Social Web CMS)
2. Make a set of social bookmarking plugins to
What I didn't intend was for Hotaru to be considered a social bookmarking platform, because it isn't. But how do you explain that to people looking for a quick alternative to Pligg, who are frustrated when social bookmarking components aren't already enabled by default, and the documentation doesn't explain the ins and outs of bookmarking-specific plugins?2. Make a set of social bookmarking plugins to
a) demonstrate the plugin system
b) allow SWCMS users (including myself) to continue our sites
b) allow SWCMS users (including myself) to continue our sites
It seems after making dozens of plugins to show what Hotaru can do, the next logical step is to make dozens of plugins to show what else it can do! :rolleyes:
Initially, I'd like to go through some of the main plugins and make them less dependent on each other, and more generic for use in other kinds of sites. That seems to be the way to go, and will help broaden our appeal somewhat. ]]>
Thanks for your patience! :) ]]>
Database class
We've got a new class for database functions. It sits on top of ezSQL and simplifies data retrieval. It's used like this:
PHP Code:
$results = $h->db->select($h, $select, $table, $where, $orderby, $limit);
PHP Code:
$select = array('*');
$table = 'posts';
$where = array(
'post_archived = %s' => 'N',
'post_type = %s' => 'news',
'post_status = %s' => 'top');
$order_by = 'post_votes_up DESC';
$limit = '10';
$results = $h->db->select($h, array('*'), $table, $where, $orderby, $limit);
PHP Code:
$h->db->select = array('*');
$h->db->table = 'posts';
$h->db->where = array(
'post_archived = %s' => 'N',
'post_type = %s' => 'news',
'post_status = %s' => 'top');
$h->db->order_by = 'post_votes_up DESC';
$h->db->limit = '10';
$results = $h->db->select($h);
Widget changes
Until now, if you wanted to display a single widget, you'd have to put it in a widget block. While that is all well and good, things can get confusing if you have multiple widget blocks, especially if you're a theme designer and want to make an "out of the box" theme that doesn't need the user to move widgets into the correct widget blocks.
So, from Hotaru 1.2, you'll be able to do this:
PHP Code:
<?php Widgets::singleWidget($h, "rss_show_1"); ?>
Home page changes
For me, the most exciting change in Hotaru 1.2 is the ability to pick a home page template. Currently, the Top Stories from SB Base show on the home page, but if you want to show a custom template, maybe a splash page or magazine style page full of widgets, you just have to add this at the top of your index.php file:
PHP Code:
$h->setHome('template_name');
When?
Not just yet. Probably in May. There are some extra goodies that need to be included first ;) . ]]>
Assembla is where we host Hotaru's code, organize tickets and determine milestones. I first used Assembla when I joined Social Web CMS back in 2008, and had no qualms about setting up an Assembla space for Hotaru, too. Recently, Sergio and the team have made a number of improvements to the service, including community support and promotion of open source projects such as ours.
Cool stuff, eh? Not only that, but Assembla made a blog post about Hotaru CMS, which my mum kindly commented on! :o
If you're interested in hosting your own project with Assembla, they've got both free and paid plans, but even better than that, they're a great bunch of lads! Don't believe me? Send them a tweet! :D ]]>
A little longer than a month ago i joined these forums after fooling around for a bit. I started out making a theme (newspaper) but then there was this autocomplete plugin request.
So i just started building with my home taught php and got really close, i just need to fix some bugs.
When working on the plugin i started to become really exited aobut hotaru, and started (trying to) helping out people and with some success. Then i builded the mobile plugin and the nightlight theme which both contain some bugs, but i simply havent got any time to get to it... fixing bugs is the boring part, i found that out aswell
Then Nick asked me to join the team and i (of course) i was honored and happy to join, so here i am now member of the team. But i'll be focussing on making plugins and themes (on request) when i have time, at least for the near future. No one knows what the future will bring.
To be honest i had no clue what social bookmarking was and was just looking for a cms which was easily extendible to my needs. But by the time i finally was capable, i was already an active communitymember and the personal project is postponed... funny how things go.
I dont think im made for blogging, but why dont give it a try.
hope to see you in the forums
Ties ]]>