Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

RPX rocks. If you don't know what it is, take a look.

I've been using RPX on my site, JapanSoc.com, for over half a year, and despite some early teething problems it has been great, both for convenience and reducing spam.

Now that Hotaru is in beta, I'm looking more towards moving JapanSoc from SWCMS to Hotaru, and that means somehow, magically, maintaining all the user ID mappings between my database and the RPX server.

This is especially complicated because the current Pligg Importer assigns new user IDs to each member - removing all those gaps left from previously deleted users. At the very least, I'll need a new column of old IDs in the users table to match the RPX IDs with the new user ones.

That means I'll need to make two different versions of the RPX plugin, one for JapanSoc with its existing RPX users, and one for other Hotaru sites who will be starting fresh with RPX and won't have these mapping problems.

There is one major catch with RPX, though. It's not free anymore. I got in as an early adopter, but now you have to pay $10 a month or a $100 a year for the service. The plugin I make will be geared towards a "Plus" account.

If I can get RPX done, I'll just finish off the JapanSoc theme I started and make the move to Hotaru. I can live without favorites, comment votes, friends and private messaging. They've never been hugely popular features anyway on my site, and can always be reintroduced later. I really want to port JapanSoc over to Hotaru by the end of the year, and that's not far away!