Today we are pleased to announce the official release of HotaruFiltr a Freemium HotarCMS theme which can be used to build a fully function digg clone social bookmarking website. HotaruFiltr has been design by ourselves from the ground up and contains an advanced themes setting page for configuring HotaruFiltr’s features easily. HotaruFiltr is a free Hotaru Theme which we think is better than anything else available in the Hotaru Community at the current time, a bold statement we know so read on to find out why we made it.
HotaruCMS is a modular based framework that allows you to build different types of content management systems by using a combination of various plugins. One of the more interesting types of website that can be built using Hotaru is a social bookmarking news website like digg.com the purpose HotaruFiltr was designed to be compatible with.
As with all upcoming CMS systems you tend to find that initially the free themes available for the system all look very basic and very similar in design. This tends to be due to the fact themes are all based upon the default theme which ships with the standard CMS install package. The current crop of free themes for HotaruCMS like many other CMS systems in days gone by seems to have suffered this fate, it’s this reason we built HotaruFiltr for the community.
HotaruFiltr has some fantastic options that we have listed below.
- jQuery Powered WordPress Like Theme Settings Page
- jQuery Lazy Image Load for Post Images, Avatars and Vote Button Image
- Facebook Like Sidebar Block
- Twitter Tweets Sidebar Block (With cached results)
- Dynamic Tabbed Top And Upcoming Stories Sidebar Block
- 300px Wide Advertising Sidebar Block
- ShareThis Post Page Integration
- Google Analytics Integration
All the features above are controllable via the HotarFiltr themes settings page.
Additional Optional Plugins To The Social Bookmarking Package
This is a list of additional plugins available to the Social Bookmarking set which we advise you to use with HotaruFiltr which have tested and made compatible with the theme.
HotaruFiltr Homepage Screenshot
HotaruFiltr Post Page Screenshot
HotaruFiltr Theme Settings Page Screenshot (jQuery Slide Enabled)
March 10, 2011 at 2:34 am
Great work guys. The borders and the grey fill really separate each post from the next. Love all the sharing options and especially the way they are all accessed via the settings rather than having to mess with code. If I was changing anything I would move the “No comments” button down to the next line (opposite the authors name) and style it similarly.
Thanks for all the hard work on it, you have raised the bar for theme designers.
March 11, 2011 at 4:04 pm
Thanks for your kind words and feedback John it’s always considered and appreciated. HotaruFiltr is an ongoing project and hopefully we can improve it further as the Hotaru core develops over time, we also wanted to release a theme that would help people choose Hotaru.
By our own admission and is always the case upon reflection it’s not the best design we have ever constructed but it does allow others to look at our code and learn from it.
As for the comments looking at the theme design placing the comments there may extend the text in that section a little too much, especially if the submitted site has a long domain name. I’m sure we could make a small tutorial showing how to customize the theme in that and similar ways for others to learn from.
February 9, 2012 at 8:25 pm
Hello Stuart. It’s perfect, you and Hotaru CSM are perfect. You and developers like you should be always considered and appreciated. I haven’t heard Hotaru CMS before but I’ll use this cms and theme as soon as obtaining the hosting and domain costs. I hope you’ll help me improve my site. Thank you very much.