Experimenting with Hotaru
I’ve been running the sites in the mabujo sports network for around 2 years now and it hasn’t always been plain sailing.
Arsenal News was the first site I made, which I started building in around May 2008.
At that time I built the site using the Pligg CMS. After a while I became irritated by the bugs and lack of development of the Pligg platform and ported Arsenal News over to swcms.
Swcms was a fork of Pligg and of course similar in many ways, but some of the original Pligg developers moved over, and there looked to be more development possibilities and better feedback so I made the jump over.
Fast foward 2 years and while Arsenal News remains to be powered by swcms, I have had to do a lot of work on the backend of the site to keep it stable and reduce server load. I also now have a number of other football sites (currently 6 others) in the network which are powered by Pligg. Development on both projects could be said to have stagnated some what, both platforms have been targeted heavily by spammers and as I and I am sure others have discovered, both have problems with scaling.
Arsenal News alone is now serving around 32,000 visitors generating around 250,000 page-views a month, and while these numbers are not particularly huge, with rss imports running every couple of minutes the server load is significant.
Enter Hotaru.
Hotaru is a new project similar to pligg and swcms, but has been built from the ground up as a modular system with strong code guidelines.
It’s just up my street and I have been keeping my eye on the project for the last few months with the hopes of migrating my sites to the platform.
I don’t want to bite off more than I can chew straight away though, so I have been testing Hotaru out on my development box for the last week or so. I decided to dive and create some themes as a learning experience and to get to grips with Hotaru, and I hope to release the first of these in the next day or so.
You can get involved with the Hotaru project at http://hotarucms.org/