Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

This quote, courtesy of scam site W3Rocks, is unfortunately quite common:

Hotaru CMS is an open source social bookmarking platform written in PHP. It's just another open source Digg clone, similar to Pligg.

And how about this confused one from Celeb Web News?

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.

If you remember a couple of months back, I was very keen to make Hotaru plugins more independent of each other so they could be used in websites other than just social bookmarking.

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.