HotaruCMS

Hotaru CMS (Japanese for firefly) was founded on June 18th 2009 by Nick Ramsay and is being developed by the Social Web CMS team and a number of enthusiastic users.

In a nutshell Hotaru CMS is an open source (GPL3), plugin-powered content management system. Think of it as "Wordpress without blogging". If Wordpress didn't do blogging by itself, you'd need plugins to do it for you. And if you had to make plugins, you wouldn't be limited to just blogging. You could make plugins for any kind of site, whether a blog, a social network, an online shop, etc. That's Hotaru CMS, a framework for making websites customized to your needs.

As an example, check out the demo. It showcases a Digg clone made with Hotaru plugins. A platform to build on The core Hotaru package provides the absolute basics for a PHP-based website: A home page, an admin page, function libraries and a plugin management system. It comes with a straightforward installation script that installs some database tables and registers you as the administrator. And that's about it. You are then left to plug in the functionality you want your site to have. A plugin-based CMS If you wanted to, you could use that foundation to build a blog, a directory, a forum, or any other kind of website, but we decided to start with a collection of plugins that make a social bookmarking site when used together.

Whereas Wordpress plugins or Pligg modules tend to be quite small, Hotaru plugins provide such key components as user systems and post publishing. That means you can completely change how your website works by editing, changing or developing your own plugins - leaving the main Hotaru core files free from modifications and easy to upgrade. Total customization Hotaru offers four main areas for customization: main themes, admin themes, plugins and language packs. Themes are small and easy to customize, and the admin section is kept separate from the main theme so you can make or use different admin styles. Plugins use templates and language files that can be edited and saved without being overwritten when upgrading. Language packs are collections of raw text used in Hotaru that can be changed or translated into different languages.

A developer-centric community The forums are intended to teach users how to customize and develop their own plugins rather than serve up ready-made ones. We're always looking for new people to develop and test Hotaru, its plugins and themes. You don't need to be a professional programmer (we're just amateurs ourselves), but if you're keen to learn then we're keen to have you!