Habari – Next Gen Blogging Platform?
An interesting platform is Habari which is aiming to be the next gen blogging platform of choice. At first glance it is just another piece of blogging software in the world dominated by WordPress, Moveable Type and others. I took one look at it and thought “nothing much to see here”. BUT…
Upon hearing that Skippy (of WordPress fame) was involved I spent more than the 30 seconds of attention web browsers are famed for and looked a little more carefully. And I like what I see so far.
I do love WordPress, I’ve set-up countless blogs using it and have been using it from v1.2. I advocate its use almost non-stop to set-up blogs or simple web sites with little hassle. And in fact using blogs/sites running WordPress is hassle-free. The hassle comes in the development. Development of themes, plugins, and other functionality. Documentation is a rat’s nest, and while there are resources out there due to the number of users, it is sub-optimal. The development of WordPress itself shares a weakness with other open source projects in that, yes the source is open but the development decisions are taken by a select group. Sometimes it works well, sometimes it doesn’t. Some say that you could always fork it but they don’t realise that barriers of entry to development are not zero even if the project is open sourced. Ok, in English that means even if you don’t like how things are going, and you are given the complete source, it is very hard work.
Habari’s difference is that it is setting out to be community driven. In English, that means if loads of your users tell you that the support forums and documentation while extensive is a mess, you listen. Or that while developers can update their installation with some fancy shell tricks blind-folded and encased in concrete you don’t forget that most users fret and sweat about deleting key files on the server before uploading new files.
This to me is the big thing and why I am looking forward to seeing Habari succeed. With initial developers including Skippy and Michael Heilemann I think it has a fighting chance.
It also aims to have cleaner, more documented code, easier for plugins and themes to be developed, not being locked down to a specific database etc. All of them admirable targets to have.
Hat-tip to Xuan to pointing me to Habari and mentioning that Skippy was involved.
I’m glad you found more interest in Habari than just a passing glance at yet another blog package.
There are actually 14 committers (people who have permission to directly change the source) to the project at present who have been awarded this position due to their contributions to making the project great. While it’s notable that several of our number are book authors and speakers on technical topics, anyone can have an equal voice in the direction of the project provided they are willing to contribute to it positively.
I certainly hope that you keep up with our developments, as we have a lot of good things in store! Thank you for your kind words!