Nick's Hotaru CMS Blog

As I said in my previous blog post, I've started converting the theme from my SWCMS site to Hotaru CMS. I've had to update both Hotaru itself and a few plugins to get this far, but that's partly why I'm doing it - to find flaws in Hotaru when building themes.

Here's the original JapanSoc site:

Attachment 25

And here's what I've done so far on Hotaru:

Attachment 26

As you can see, the general feel of the site is done, though I still have more work to do on the top menu and the sidebar will be quite a challenge - probably requiring a new plugin or two.

The best module I ever made for SWCMS (which I never released) was the "social bar" which you can see at the bottom of the first image. It was an Ajax-powered control panel of sorts which did everything: showed points, followed/unfollowed people (with notification emails), sent private messages, search for users, showed recent activity level, online status, join history, log out, access admin, killspam, and had links to profiles, settings and favorites. Best of all, when you clicked on someone's avatar, your social bar would switch to show all their details including links to their website and Twitter account.

It was great, but surprisingly underused and a bit "heavy". One user alerted me to the fact that it didn't stick to the bottom of the screen on an iPhone, which kind of sucks. So I plan to drop it from my site during this conversion. As fantastic as I think it is, I'm not sure most JapanSoc users will notice it's gone!

Anyway, my next task will be to convert the sidebar. I'll probably either make a new version of the Sidebar Posts plugin with a tabbed box, or put a tabbed box option into the current plugin. Either way, I'll need to do the same for Comments and Favorites, too - and Hotaru doesn't even have favorites yet!