The last five days have seemed both like an eternity and an eye blink, all over a word - Habari - that many people are just recently becoming aware of.
Maybe you first noticed when Chris J. Davis switched his blogging software away from WordPress. After that, dominos started falling, with posts about it from interesting corners of meta-blogdom. It's really been hard to keep up with the influx of interested people and do development and have a life. Thanks so much to Berta for her support during this process, which is undoubtly greatly attributed to her being tired of hearing me complain about WordPress.
So what's the big deal, anyway? Maybe people have said they're interested, but without actually dipping into the small-but-growing community and asking around, it might be hard to get a sense of what any of this really means. Let me cover a few of the common questions and misunderstandings surrounding Habari.
What is Habari?Habari is a new blogging platform named with a swahili word meaning "News" or colloquially, "What's up?". It is installed on a server of your own, not a blogging service, like Blogger. Habari aims to be a fully functional blogging tool. With Habari, a blogger can do anything they can with the most common blogging tools that are available - draft posts, publish drafts, receive and moderate comments, the sort of thing that blog software does.
Why not use {some other blogging tool}?There are different reasons for using different tools as each has its strengths. I hope that time proves out Habari's choice to focus on community involvement in every step - planning, design, implementation, distribution, through support. Habari has also chosen to focus on modern technology and coding techniques that legacy systems are not as easily able to integrate.
Why develop another blogging tool?Everyone in the project has his own reasons for wanting to start fresh rather than contribute to another project or fork something extant, and any reason is really going to be personal. For me, the big reasons are an opportunity to help shape the direction of the project, to build something truly new and inventive, and - especially - to share the experience with people who have these same interests.
Who is associated to this project?Well, we've had a few people join up with the cause since skippy, Rich Bowen, Chris J Davis and I conceived it back during OhioLinux. We knew that our coder skills would need some help if we were ever going to get a pretty UI design. Khaled Abou Alfa offered up his time in response to our call, and dropped off some crazy wonderful UI designs. After seeing what the project was all about, Michael Heilemann decided he was in, too.
Robert Deaton, who I practically dragged to the New York WordPress meetup with the intention of chatting up Habari, has provided a ton of great PHP insight from very early on. Jay Pipes has been great at pounding against our stubborn WP-isms (since that's where most of us come from) and getting us to consider some code that will really blow your mind when we finally release.
There are four published book authors in our core group. That statistic blows my mind.
I'm missing people who I don't know if I should name specifically, but who have provided code and design reviews all along the way. And I'm really lax in recognizing the folks who have come by our IRC channel on freenode over the past few days and - for whaveter reason posessed them - actually started to help and contribute code, documentation, testing, and enthusiastic moral support. I knew that people would want what we're trying to build, but the turnout from even our unprepared unofficial announcement has amazed me.
So what is special about Habari?There are a few things that you'll notice about Habari the software apart from the decidedly inviting atmosphere in which we all work. Predominantly, we're using all of this year's tools. PHP 5 instead of PHP 4. MySQL 4 (or 5, still thinking about that) instead of 3. We use a complete object-oriented approach to our code that makes it very easy to experiment; tossing new things to the wall and see if they stick. The PHP Data Objects that ships with PHP 5 enables us to ditch some of the SQL injection issues that have plagued blog tools in the past, and affects performance very positively. (Using imports of our blogs with 2-3k posts and their comments, pre-alpha Habari data access was visibly perceptible as faster.)
The plugin system is top-notch: simple and flexible, written using objects that are very easy to learn. Habari does most of the work for you by registering your plugin hooks, and providing a special home in the interface for your plugin to interact with the admin pages for configuration. The theme system is similarly flexible.
Instead of settling on a single type of template, our template engine is pluggable. You should be able to create a theme using PHP functions (like WordPress does), or the popular Smarty engine, or an engine of another design. Themes will decide what features they offer, either by using a default set of templates (providing a set of template files for each type of page that the engine will display) or by telling the theme engine what pages are available - allowing you to easily add templates with special features at the URL of your choosing.
It sounds complicated, but in the few short days Habari has been in the open, I've seen both a new, working theme, and the Habari engine turned into something like pastebin. Note that this was constructed without anything but the sample code and the inline documentation, and in about a day. It just kind of showed up one day with a couple of guys saying, "Look what I did!"
Spam-handling is not an afterthought in the core product. While we continue to hack away at Habari, comment spammers are bringing some servers to their knees. When MT and WP were in core development, spam didn't exist. Having helped pioneer comment spam detection on WordPress (the original Spam Karma plugin was based on my spam-prevention plugin design), I know how difficult it was to shoehorn detection and moderation into the plugin architecture. As a result of the experience everyone has gained over the years of fighting spam, we realize the importance of making it easy for Habari to fight spam.
As a testament to this, Chris Davis showed me his Akismet plugin for Habari (hey, it's GPL! see below) tonight, and it seems to work just fine (and may be released on his site in a few days). If this development can happen that fast, I have full faith that an open source, peer-to-peer, distributed anti-spam solution that handles spam as well as Akismet will eventually find it's way to a Habari plugin.
Our documentation is going to be edited and ship with the software. If our site goes down, your documentation doesn't. Even with the bundled help, we still plan for a full community site with extra detailed help and user interaction for people who need more. And since we require documentation be submitted with source code updates, all of the developer documentation is written by actual developers that understand the code, and it instantly exists.
I'm glossing over a lot. There is too much very cool stuff to cover in this short of a space. Did I mention database independence with MySQL, SQLite, and Postgres as targets? Atom Publishing Protocol support?
Of course much of this is unimplemented functionality. But it is planned functionality. And a lot of it already does exist. We've figured out how we're going to do it over the past few months, and now it's just a matter of doing it.
But the next time you ask me what's special about Habari, I'll be sure only to mention the people. Because they just freakin' rock.
I've heard you're not using the GPL, does that mean Habari is not open source?Habari uses a slightly modified Apache Software License. The Apache Software License (APL) allows us to distribute our source and make sure everyone who helped out gets credit for it. If you contribute to Habari, you're agreeing to those terms. Apart from that, and that's not really a downside, where is the downside?
With the GPL, if you release your code as GPL, anyone who modifies your code is required to distribute that code under the same license, and the license requires them to pass on both the license and the source. In fact, some have suggested that plugins authored for GPL blogging tools are also tainted by the GPL in that they use that blogging tool's library functions. This means that you are permitted to sell your WordPress plugin, but when you do, the person who buys it can then re-sell it for less money, or even give it away for free! I guess there's a business model there -- sell your first copy for big dollars.
People who argue against the APL say that if you can sell the code that's APL-licensed, then the freely available source of plugins and themes will dry up. People who argue against the APL say that we'll lose the ability to use wonderful GPL-licensed code in our project. I don't know how the community will respond to those statements. I wonder idly who benefits more from which license, and whether people realize that GPL plugins to an APL core are just as valid and possibly more flexible than using a GPL core.
I know that our intent is to keep Habari free and open, and also to be fair with our own use of other projects with the same license, just like open source intended. If people think they can make money by selling Habari add-on tools, that's great - it means Habari is doing as well as I hope it will.
Isn't the high-tech requirement a bit steep for the common blogger?Last year I started putting my Adsense money to good use, buying cheap hosting at a ton of hosting sites to see if you actually get what you pay for. That plan... It kind of fizzled. But as a result, I've got a few hosting plans at a few popular hosts and suddenly a good reason to do some "common man" testing.
As it turns out, Dreamhost, Site5, MediaTemple, and A Small Orange will all support Habari, with a single config line change. If your host isn't on this short list, your host might even still be able to run Habari. The thought that PHP5 is not widespread enough to be mainstream is, well... about as old as PHP4.
What's with the bells?You might hve seen some bells in our various logo revisions. Here's the idea: Habari is the swahili word for news. When one thinks of news, they might think of a town crier, which is a very primitive form of podcasting. A town crier often has a bell.
One of the first logos we had was one I cooked up that is basically kind of trying to be a lowercase "h" in a sort of bell shape with a clapper. You can see it carved into a pumpkin.
Aren't you just another WP contributor who is angry about being passed over for inclusion in Automattic, and so you've gotten together to form a new blog package out of spite, but just like b2evolution, TextPattern, and other WordPress-knockoffs it'll never get off the ground?Oddly, I've seen this question twice this week, and I suppose that even more people are thinking it.
Yes I am a WP contributor, and I continue to be. I organize the world's largest regular WordPress meetup, and that won't stop just because of Habari. I continue to use WordPress professionally, so I don't really see what sense there is having "bad blood" between these projects. I certainly don't have any bad feelings because nobody ever asked me to work for Automattic. I love my job and the people I work with, and I'm pretty comfortable right where I am, as is everyone else on the Habari team whose job I know of.
As far as whether Habari gets off the ground, well... From the interest so far, I'd say we have a pretty good chance. Those other projects mentioned do have fairly decent sized followings of their own (the size of any of those groups for Habari would make me plenty happy), and remember that WordPress was once good ole b2|cafelog. Being that the project is three months old and is hundreds of lines long, it is now much more mature than what this question implies.
How did all this start?This is about as good a recount of the Habari conception story as you can get without Memorex. And the reason I was at OhioLinux? Skippy suckered me out there with the promise of beer, only to fill my head with ideas of new projects and collaboration. I was seduced by the spinning, plexiglass-encased bust of Pope John Paul on the giant lazy susan table at Columbus' Buca de Beppo, and I somehow agreed to the whole thing. But there was beer. And live, nude penguins.
When will it be ready for me to try?It's going to be ready for me to try very soon, just as it was ready for Chris. I need to sort out some feed details to make sure certain things don't break, and then it's import/switch to the new theme.
You can try it now, too. Go to the project site, check out the code with subversion (we're not even at a developer preview state yet, so there's no archive you can download) to a server that meets the requirements, and watch it run.
If you have a WordPress database around, you can run the importer to test out Habari with all your posts. Stop by the #habari channel on irc.freenode.net and tell use about your experience. Join the mailing list, read up, and send in your comments.
"Spread the News" - that's our slogan about what you do with Habari. Be a participant. You'll enjoy it.
Thanks to these sites, who talked about Habari early on:h0bbelBlogging ProYellow SwordfishPhotomattwankSolo Technology
Nicely said Owen, nicely said. Very nice overview.
[...] In today’s age, you cannot afford to compete with Wordpress and Movable Type unless you have good enough USPs. Habari has the edge over Wordpress by using the latest technology, mainly PHP5. PHP5 supports an object oriented object model as compared to its predecessors and provides a chance to write strong object oriented code. I personally believe that OOP encourages better and flexible design, which in my opinion can benefit Wordpress too. David Peralty has put up a lot of information about the project. Habari will create some interest as it has developers who have been active with Wordpress before. Read posts by the contributors to get the background - Chris Davis, Michael Heilemann and Khaled Abou Alfa. It will be really interesting if Habari turns out to be a technically better Wordpress or something completely original. I sense a fear against object oriented programming in the Wordpress community that it will make Wordpress tougher to develop or use. Habari can score there. As I have read more about Habari, some kind of politics seems to have been read between the lines. I had no idea when I tried Habari out of curiosity. I think Owen Winkler puts everything together in his detailed post about Habari. I still think Habari has the advantage of the new technology, and can lead to a better design. I think the projects should be discussed apolitically, on their technical merit. [...]
Thanks, man. :)
[...] Habari is a new blogging platform being developed by a number of well known people, some of which are fed up with open source, others just looking for new challenges. [...]
APL, huh? I think might be doable. Perhaps I'll put it in the queue.
I suppose the design goals are so that it only works with free software?
[...] Update: Flere interessante links: http://www.skippy.net/blog/2007/01/09/spread-the-news/ http://asymptomatic.net/2007/01/09/2892/whats-up/ http://www.brokenkode.com/archives/habari/ http://technorati.com/tag/habari Og så kan man iøvrigt selv downloade scriptet og afprøve det hvis man er lidt nørdet. [...]
[...] 起初我都覺得 Habari 極其量是眾多新 blogging platform 中的其中一個，不要說能否普及，隨時會「爛尾」胎死腹中，但最近聽到一些有關 Habari 的消息（1、2），令我覺得 Habari 極有機會跑出，甚至有機會成為 WordPress 的競爭對手，何出此言呢？ 首先看看有什麼人在 Habari 的 developer、designer 之列吧，有 K2 的 Michael Heilemann 和 Chris J. Davis，Khaled Abou Alfa、Owen Winkler、Skippy 等人，他們都是 WordPress community 中有名和有貢獻的人物，為何他們會另起爐灶開發 Habari 呢？ [...]
[...] There’s been a lot of speculation as to why we’re doing this. I’m not going to speak for the others (because they’re doing a pretty good job of it themselves to be honest) but I’ll tell you why I’m doing this. I’ve been talking to (read: boring) many of my offline friends with just how cool this is going to be. The first thing that they ask me is “Why the hell are you doing this to yourself? Why are you working for free again? Why are you spending your free time doing this?” I can only answer by saying that it’s incredible fun to be part of an online community of like minded people who are trying to make one of my favourite pastimes (ie blogging and tinkering with my website) a more enjoyable experience. I love being involved in open source projects and this is without a doubt one of the biggest things I’ve ever been involved with. [...]
[...] Whats Up: Owen [...]
[...] It’s got an all-star cast behind it. So far I’ve seen (in no particular order) Rich Bowen, Chris J. Davis, Jay Pipes, Binary Bonsai, Scott Merrill, Khaled Abou Alfa, Owen Winkler, and well, a few more. I think I should stop linking them in case Google bans me. But the point is, there’s a lot of talent here. [...]
[...] Most Bloggernacle sites seem to be powered by Wordpress. This makes sense, as WordPress has been one of the best if not the best blogging software around. However, we should take note that a number (1,2,3,4,5,6) of formerly prominent WordPress users have announced they are moving over to a new blogging open-source blogging software called Habari. While I’m certainly not about to dump WordPress, these are serious coders who have been very involved with WordPress for quite awhile. For them to jump ship, in my opinion, is not a small thing. So I’ll certainly be paying attention to what happens with this other blogging software. Site Search Tags: No Tags Technorati Tags: No Tags Related Tags: No Tags [...]
[...] हबारी के बनने की खबर पर वर्डप्रेस के संस्थापक मैट का कहना था कि हबारी ड्रूपल और सेरेंडिपिटी के मिलन सा होगा। हालांकि मैट ने इस प्रकल्प का सहयोग देने का वायदा किया और अपने सर्वर देने की पेशकश भी कर दी पर वर्डप्रेस के खेमे में खलबली साफ दिखती है। कुछ ने राय दी कि ये राजनीती है मैट की कंपनी आटोमैटिक द्वारा नियुक्ति न मिलने से खफा लोगों की है। हबारी दल के स्किपी ने स्पष्ट तो किया कि यह बात गलत है पर यह आरोप लगाने से भी नहीं चूके कि वर्डप्रेस में स्पैम से लड़ने की सुविधा बैंडएड कि तरह चस्पा कर दी गई। यह भी कहा की हबारी का पहला रीलीज़ वे 6 महीने के पहले ही ले आयेंगे और इसमें वर्डप्रेस से आयात की सुविधा भी शामिल होगी। इसके विपरीत ओवेन का कहना है कि वर्डप्रेस से कोई नाराज़गी नहीं है और वे उससे भी जुड़े रहेंगे। [...]
[...] The creator of Wordpress Matt modestly wrote that Habari would probably be Drupal meets Serendipity. He not only pledged his support for the initiative but also offered his servers. Despite of this the unrest in the WP camp is quite noticeable. Some said that this is the outcome of politics of people pissed off from not getting appointed at Automattic. Habari’s Skippy clarified this wasn’t so but wasn’t wary of terming the spam-prevention capability of Wordpress as Band-Aid code. The Habari team is hopeful of cutting a relapse before 6 months and yes this will have the capability of "importing from Wordpress". Owen on the other hand said that there are no hard feelings and he would continue to be with Wordpress as well. [...]
[...] Voices such as Chris, Michael, Owen, Khaled and Skippy to name but a few, many of whom are well known in the wordpress community. [...]
[...] Another interesting piece of news is that some of the key members of WordPress are starting a new project called Habari. It remains to be seen if it will be as good as or better than WordPress of course. Right now, only SVN checkout is allowed, but some kind of developer preview will be available soon, I guess. It is interesting though that in this free world, it is possible to challenge the "establishment" and forge your own way should you feel the need to do so. Now, while many may highlight the various advantageous of a more authoritarian approach, it is important to realise that this sort of "rebellion" every once and a while is very useful to produce the quantum leap forwards. [...]
It's interesting to me that you call Textpattern a WordPress knockoff, when they do not stem from the same codebase (as with B2) and are diametrically different in their approaches to templating and content management. I know it wasn't your intention to single out and bash Textpattern, but I would say that it's well "off the ground," being one of the authors of an upcoming book devoted entirely to TXP.
No, it was not my intent to single out and bash Textpattern. As a matter of fact, although the question was self-authored, it's an echo of what ignorant questions that have been posed to me over the last week or so, and not my own voice at all.
As I said, I would be happy for Habari to have a userbase as large as Textpattern's. Maybe then someone will write a Habari book. ;)
[...] Et il semble que plusieurs bloggeurs réputés rejoignent petit à petit le projet. [...]
Good to hear. Thanks for clearing that up!
I'm getting really excited. I can't wait.
[...] 这几天在安装测试Habari，Habari是一个全新的Blogging程序，使用Apache License 2.0授权。现有团队包括Michael Heilemann、Chris J. Davis，Khaled Abou Alfa、Owen Winkler、Skippy。很眼熟这些名字对吗？他们都是WordPress community中的强人，WP现在的默认模版、默认插件、一度传说中的admin新界面都是出自这些人之手。但是由于WordPress商业化味道越来越浓，community部分又一如既往地单薄，于是他们开始创建Habari：一个并不仅仅是新技术，更是以community为本的Blogging程序。 Habari暂时只能通过SVN获取，整体完成度远没有达到公开发布的程度。我创建这个零时Blog一是为了测试它，另一个希望是有一天我会把它作为Blogging程序。 Habari很快，由于它和我原有的WordPress站点同处于一台服务器，所以这个感受还是可以相信的。 简洁漂亮的后台界面。事实上现在的SVN版本后台连一个半成品都谈不上，但是整体风格已是可以想象。很明显后台是由Khaled Abou Alfa制作设计的，样式色彩可以参看可能永远成为传说的Shuttle项目。 导入WordPress异常简单。Habari通过数据库来导入WordPress站点，文章、留言、页面可以完美导入，但是现在的SVN版本在对中文站点导入上还有问题。（已有较为完美的解决办法，暂时还没有进官方代码） 没有分类。至少现在的版本上看不到使用分类的迹象，代替它的是一个Tags系统。 暂时就写这些，以后我会写一些安装方法、注意事项之类，不过可以预见的是不会再做一个BPCN那样的站点来介绍Habari了。 [...]
[...] I've noticed a handful of posts for an up-and-coming blogging platform called Habari. Development can be followed here. Spearheading the project is Chris J. Davis, a long time WordPress user. Lending a hand to the project are Michael H. Heilamen (primary K2 theme developer), Kahled (who appears to have attempted installing it because his site's broken at present), and Owen Winkler. [...]
[...] 这两天 Habari 已经被讨论的足够多了（好吧，我承认在中文 Blogsphere 里还不够多），大家关注的重点当然是为什么这么一个明星队伍 (Michael Heilemann、Chris J. Davis，Khaled Abou Alfa、Owen Winkler、Skippy) 要离开 Wordpress 去重头再去弄一个新的 Blog Engine。虽然这上面这几位都在自己的 Blog 里作出了说明，但似乎还是没法平息人们对 Matt 逼走他们的猜疑。绝大数人还是对 Habari 的理念非常支持的，从现在能看到的 Habari 的样品来看，Habari 还是非常值得期待的一个产品。 [...]
What is going to happen do Wordpress? It seems that on every post about Habari that more Wordpress users post comments saying that they are fed up with Wordpress, and are quite willing to switch to Habari, does this mean that Wordpress is going way of B2? With what is going on it seems like that.
So I'm a few weeks late on this one, but...
Did I somehow miss this? I know I was really out of sorts that evening, but I don't recall hearing anything about this. I'm so confused, haha.
In any case, from what I've read here and there about the project, I love the the reasoning, totally understand the motivations, think highly of many of those involved, and yet I'm left with certain reservations about where it's actually going (how and why are plainly addressed). I'm definitely interested though. I may drop you a note since I never seem to find the time to hop on irc.
Hope all is well,
Jason
No, it wouldn't have been cool to talk about Habari during the meetup. We discussed it mostly on the ferry and the hike from the Starbucks to Times Square to the Apple store.
Just what i've been waiting for, an object-oriented approach. Can't wait there.
I sometimes can't help it with non-object-oriented codes, it confuses me a lot. I wanted to make a simple object-oriented one for my own use, but don't have that much time I guess.
Hopefully I can help the development if it's object-oriented.
what's up with it being HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN in the only template that comes in the zip? i was just perusing the code and that caught my eye because of the supposed concentration on new technologies and best practices... what gives?
Dan, I turned my reply into a new post.
...es-html" rel="bookmark" title="Permanent Link to Why Habari Uses HTML">Why Habari Uses HTML Dan asks:
what's up with it being HTML 4.01 Transitional//EN in the only template that comes in the zip? i w...
Uhm, guys harabi.com website is down as of 4:59 PST 20071216
Dave, harabi.com isn't our site. It's habariproject.org.
..."_blank">Michael de Binary Bonsai, Skippy, Owen Winkler et bien d’autres. J’avais déjà ...