Back in February I started becoming interested in this new blogging project called Habari. I, like most people, had been using WordPress for years on what passed for my pathetic excuse for a blog.
Over those years I went through phases of love and hate for WordPress as they branched out and tried new things. Often it seemed that the good came hand-in-hand with the bad. While striving to improve their product and push adoption to the masses, many changes seemed to forsake those hard core users who had been loyal all along.
With the creation of the wordpress.com hosted platform and the funding of Automattic to continue to improve and pursue these ventures, things really began to take a turn for the worse. The line between open source and commercial venture began to blur, and continued development seemed to focus on the hosted aspect, rather than the self-hosted community. Some features did trickle back down, but the gap continued to grow as time went on.
Along the way, something totally unrelated to WordPress and the blogging world happened. My coding skills improved. While I had previously been content to harness the awesome power of the WordPress plugin system, I now felt the need to branch out and spread my coding wings. Realizing that the WordPress code base was a mess of PHP4 code, global functions and variables, and lacked any documentation at all, I became frustrated trying to make changes. Since that time, WordPress has attempted to make strides in the documentation and global functions areas, but for the most part the codebase remains as messy as ever.
Looking for alternatives, I happened to stumble upon Habari. Several people I’d known from the WordPress IRC channel had begun to frequent their IRC channel as well, and I migrated over mainly to have more people to chat with regularly. As I became more familiar with the people involved and started participating in some of the arguments happening around functionality and usability, I began to become more and more interested in the product as a whole.
Habari is totally PHP5-based. It doesn