Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

A Few Thoughts About Hotaru's Direction...

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6 Comments

Nick

, 05-19-2010 at 03:56 PM (3343 Views)

With my recent change in the forum, pushing threads into a dedicated "social bookmarking" section, you can probably tell that I'm keen to break out of the social bookmarking mold and into other areas.

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

a) demonstrate the plugin system
b) allow SWCMS users (including myself) to continue our sites
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?

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!

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.

Tags: future

Categories: General

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Comments

baadier - 05-19-2010 11:50 PM
What is the end vision for Hotaru Nick, youve mentioned it before that you dont want Hotaru pigeon-holed as a social bookmarking engine(though its brilliant at that)? I have to use other cms's as an example but do you envision Hotaru becoming flexible like Joomla and Drupal?
Nick - 05-20-2010 01:59 AM
I've never actually used Joomla or Drupal, so can't really compare and don't plan to emulate what they're already doing. My hope is that Hotaru's bare bones approach will appeal to developers who just want a minimal setup, i.e. plugin system, admin panel, ready-to-use database tables and a library of useful functions.

Say, for example, you wanted to make a Twitter app. Would you use Joomla or Drupal? Probably not. You could, however, install Hotaru and then start coding on top of it, taking advantage of Inspekt, ezSQL, smartCache and user authentication, without having to add all that stuff yourself.

That's what I call flexible. For non-developers, though, Drupal and Joomla are more attractive because they enable you to build sites without any knowledge of PHP, etc.

It's quite possible that guys like Shibuya246 and Ties will make plugins that move us closer to CMSs like Drupal and Joomla. And I'm happy for that to happen so long as we stick to the "functions in the core, features in the plugins" philosophy.
baadier - 05-20-2010 02:21 AM
I see where youre coming from completely,hotaru is the base for pretty much everything else that could possibly added on. This will allow for a lot of growth and diversity when more and more developers start using Hotaru. Have you thought about listing Hotaru on http://php.opensourcecms.com/ for more exposure?
Nick - 05-20-2010 02:31 PM
I will, I will, I promise!
louis - 05-21-2010 07:45 PM
I think you developed a great CMS framework here. I see Hotaru being a viable alternative to other CMS's and blogging platforms because it can be setup with just the right set of plugins to be a blog or Digg clone and anything in-between. However, as baadier mentioned "you don't want Hotaru pigeon-holed as a social bookmarking engine (though it’s brilliant at that)?" With my minimal experience with Hotaru I cannot agree more; but that's not all it has to be brilliant at, either. Nick Hotaru can be "branded" as "social CMS" where bookmarking is just one of "social configurations" you can setup. Think "social plugin packs" e.g. social bookmarking - blogging - social network - Hotaru enhancements / extras. I wish you luck and success on getting Hotaru where you envision it.
Nick - 05-22-2010 02:12 AM
Thank you very much!