Chris Meller

There’s going to be a Habari Hack-A-Thon this weekend to try and get several features wrapped up and as many bugs as possible squashed before a 0.6 release.

The two main features we’ll hopefully be finishing off are ACL and our new, more generic, Taxonomy system.

The current stable major release, 0.5, was packaged up and shipped on July 27th, so we’ve come a long way from that. As many people who still run 0.5 know, most of the plugins and themes currently in use by the community have long since broken as they’ve been updated to work with the latest pre-0.6 SVN code. Here’s hoping the HAT produces some great progress towards a speedy fresh version of Habari.

If you’d like to help us hunt bugs, test changes, or just come by for some witty commentary, we’re always available on IRC in #habari on Freenode. You can use your favorite IRC client, the Habari LiveHelp plugin, or use Mibbit for a web-based client.

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

That’s right, I’ve switched…

There are broken links galore. I’m slowly moving towards fixing them.

After a whole week of being sick and generally not feeling well enough to work on anything, I’ve finally gotten back to hacking on some Habari code.

I’ve been up until about 5am the last two mornings working on a variety of things. Yesterday included a plugin directory plugin that hopefully will eventually find a home on the Habari servers providing directory and update notification services. I also had the opportunity to track down an obscure database class error while helping add some new tag merging / renaming functionality.

This morning I’ve been hammering away at a new database schema for Oracle. All in all there aren’t a lot of changes, but things like the lack of auto_increment fields¹ made it a very time-consuming process.

Tomorrow I hope to get some more work done on Oracle support (hopefully allowing me to test a running blog, if not the installation and other backend functionality) and finish some updates I’ve had planned for the Monthly Archives plugin for far too long.

At some point in the next couple of days I would also love to rearrange my desk. Unfortunately that means I first have to clean it off, which is a much larger task than it should be…

1. Or the convenient SERIAL data type in Postgres which emulates the trigger / sequence functionality. ↩