Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

Just a brief post today to say that work continues on Hotaru 1.4 and a beta will be made available soon for testing.

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.