BakerCMS was first developed by Nick Ramsey under the title Hotaru CMS and is a plugin based content management system. Over the past year or so development of HotaruCMS slowed and eventually ceased with Nick recently announcing that he was closing forum registrations on HotaruCMS.org.

Here is Nicks offical announcment.

Hi everyone,

It has been about 18 months since Hotaru was last updated and the project has, for the most part, been abandoned by myself and other developers.

I feel bad for new members that have just discovered Hotaru, downloaded and installed it, then soon realized there is little support available in the forum and the software has not been updated in ages.

So, I’m going to start winding this project down by…

Disabling forum registration
Preventing non-members from downloading attachments (including the Hotaru zip)
Remove the homepage and demos

I’ll leave the forums and documentation up… but probably not forever.

Thanks to everyone who supported Hotaru over the years. It was a pleasure working with you. Should anyone wish to fork the project and continue with it elsewhere, that would be great!

This was pretty sad news as I personally use hotaru on several sites WPSift is my latest and developed the free Hotarufiltr theme for the system which was a pretty popular theme.

Nick gives his permission for anyone to fork the project continuing it’s development and after some thinking I decided this is something I would like to do.

BakerCMS will be the name of this fork of Hotaru CMS.

What are my plans for development going forward.

Firstly i will have to complete the main website for the BakerCMS project along with a new codex / documentation section on that website (temporary not complete one at the moment) and it will also have a verified plugin and theme section, this is about 80% complete code and structure wise.

In the future we will be moving all stable versions of plugins to the main site out of the forums the same will be true for themes, we will still have support forums for plugins and themes along with a development section for beta plugins.

At the moment we will host & supply the existing version of Hotaru CMS 1.4.2 for download, the next version of the system will be released as BakerCMS and will contain any bugfixes that arise.

We will develop a new default theme for BakerCMS that should be easily customizable and editable, the design of this theme is something we want existing hotaru users to be involved with so all suggestions on design aspects / ideas are welcomed. The theme will be designed in photoshop so if you have skills using PS please feel free to offer any help you can. The theme will be developed in HTML5 and CSS3, I am still deciding on whether it should be responsive or not or whether we should create a static theme and a responsive theme for user choice, what you think?.

If anyone wants to help out with the project drop me a mail at thebakercms [@] gmail.com

If you have any questions about the BakerCMS fork please feel free to ask and I will answer them all as best I can.

Regards

Stuart

The forums as you can see are fully operational and you can ask for support and add plugins, themes etc

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