Hotaru CMS, uses Assembla to host their subversion repository and make use of our integrated tickets. In the nine months since the project began, Hotaru CMS has begun to acquire a following thanks to it's innovative plugin-driven PHP framework for building robust websites.
When we caught up with Nick Ramsay, the project founder, he said this of Hotaru CMS, "It differs from other such systems because almost everything is a plugin, including user registration, comments, category management and post submission. If you're not happy with how a particular feature works, you can change, replace or extend the plugin responsible for that feature."
Nick's own site, JapanSoc.com, is a great example of the potential Hotaru CMS holds for people wanting to build their own Digg clone.
Out of the box, Hotaru (japanese for firefly) allows users to create powerful Social News sites a la Digg and Reddit, complete with user story submission, voting, comments and categories, and integration with Gravatar for user avatars.
The true power of a piece of software like Hotaru CMS lies in its plugin-driven architecture, allowing developers building sites on Hotaru the ability to easily expand the core functionality or add completely new functionality using the hooks and methods exposed by the framework.
With the plugins already available you are able to include user profiles, activity streams & rss feeds, allow users to log in using multiple services like Facebook, Twitter, Google, and Yahoo (using the new RPX plugin), build multi-user blog sites, a link directory and much more.
When asked about Assembla, Nick added "We chose Assembla to host our project because it's easy to use, provides all the tools we need in one place, and is particularly supportive of open source projects such as ours."
Hotaru CMS is a great example of how Public and Private Projects can use Assembla to work with distributed teams (Founder, Nick Ramsay is in Japan and members of the Hotaru Development team are all over the world), manage their source code, and use our Integrated Tickets System to plan iterations and squash bugs.
Project Website: http://hotarucms.org
Assembla Space: http://assembla.com/spaces/hotarucms
Demo Websites:
http://demo.hotarucms.com
http://vote.hotarucms.com
http://JapanSoc.com