Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

It's been a full day here at Hotaru Central. Here's what's going on behind the scenes:

While Shibuya246 is sitting in his home office in the heart of Tokyo, I'm at my desk in my country home at the foot of the Japan Alps. Together we are connected via Skype and sharing our screens so we can go through each other's code.

We have a shared checklist of things to get done by Sunday night our time, and we're knocking them off one-by-one. In the last 24 hours, we've finished a new feature in Maintenance to generate a system report. This will help tremendously in identifying problems. That report and all error logs are now only accessible to users with admin access and they delete themselves if they grow to big.

The Cron plugin is done, and its first task will be to check for new Hotaru versions and update you of their availability in your Admin CP. We've also been testing SMTP email authentication extensively and are satisfied it works for all the emails Hotaru sends out. We've even made changes to enable users to easily override all or part of the language used in Admin, something that will open the door for the first language packs.

The plugin that you're all waiting for, "AutoReader", is getting closer and closer to completion. This is a very powerful plugin that enables you to create multiple RSS import campaigns for different users so you can automatically fill your site with content. This is currently Shibuya246's highest priority and he's busy squashing last minute bugs. hoping to release the first version along with Hotaru 1.1.3.

Another very cool feature which is not too far from completion is "Social Bar", an external link bar, much like that used by Digg. This is one that I can't wait to use on my own site, so stay tuned for that!

Please, please, please, please, please follow us on Twitter, Facebook and help us get the word out about Hotaru. The more people that get involved, the faster it will grow and the more features you will get. Oh, and if you see a post in the forums that you can help with, please take a moment to help out your fellow users.

Cheers!
Nick.