A quick glance at Hotaru’s demo site and you’d be forgiven for thinking it’s just another open source Digg clone, similar to Pligg, Drigg and SocialWebCMS. First impressions can be deceptive though, because the moment you’ve installed Hotaru, it becomes apparent that it’s not a social bookmarking platform at all… unless you want it to be that is.

Hotaru CMS is merely a shell, consisting of a front page, an Admin Control Panel and a Plugin Management section. From there, you can choose from dozens of plugins available for free at HotaruCMS.org to bring your website to life. Since Hotaru is the brainchild of the SocialWebCMS team, it’s not surprising that the first batch of plugins are geared towards a social bookmarking site.

What Plugins Does it Have?

Pretty much everything is plug ‘n’ play. Hotaru has plugins for user registration, story submission, sidebar widgets, admin email, comments, and much, much more. Anyone who has used Pligg will be thrilled by Hotaru’s working Akismet plugin – yes, it actually works for comments and plugins, placing questionable content in a moderation queue and reporting false positives back to the Akismet server.

As well as Akismet, there’s a plugin for StopForumSpam.com which enables Hotaru sites to report spam users to a central database so they can’t register at other Hotaru sites. But if we’re going to get into anti-spam features, those two plugins are just the beginning. Here’s a list that will make Pligg users drool:

• ReCaptcha – Email confirmation.
• Block by IP.
• Block by email address.
• Block by username.
• Email notification of new users with an option to approve or deny them access.
• Ban, killspam, or physically delete users.
• Place users under moderation (so you can approve their posts or comments).
• Group and individual user permissions to submit, vote, comment, etc. – Block posts from being re-submitted.
• Block posts by url or domain.
• Limit daily submissions for posts and coments – Restrict the submission rate (e.g. set 10 mins before being able to post again).
• Moderate first X submissions or comments.
• Enable/disable comments site-wide and on individual threads.
• Close threads, but retain existing comments.
• Limit the number of urls allowed in posts or comments.
• Hide or physically delete posts and comments.
• Flag posts – a bury button that shows the number of buries and their reasons.

Are Themes and Plugins Easy to Make?

It would seem so. For a start, everything is in PHP so you don’t have to mess about with Smarty templates as you do in Pligg and SWCMS. In fact, the default theme is a measly six template files, and should appeal to anyone who is familiar with WordPress themes.

Likewise, plugins are well documented in the Hotaru forums and appear easy enough to make. In a nutshell, you write functions specifically for plugin hooks, so if you see a plugin hook like this:

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< ?php $hotaru->plugins->pluginHook('sidebar'); ?>

You can write a function like this:

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function sidebar() {
echo "Hello World";
}

On the topic of programming, Hotaru’s developers don’t claim to be experts. In fact, they admit openly to being amateur PHP hobbyists with a love for open source. Anyone is welcome to join them and contribute to the project, just how open source should be.

Summary

While Hotaru CMS holds a lot of promise, it is still in beta and lacking comment votes, private messaging, friends and favorites. If you can live without those and are keen to get started, you won’t be disappointed. There are more than enough other features to keep you entertained, such as comment subscription, Gravatar, Smilies, and best of all, a Pligg Importer.

To think this has all been done in about six months. If Hotaru isn’t limited to social bookmarking, might we have blogs and forums as part of the CMS a year from now? I wouldn’t bet against it!

Visit, Demo and Download: Hotaru CMS