Habari's community is a sight in action. Two weeks ago, I threatened to make a significant change to the appearance of Habari's back-end admin, and the day afterward, I executed on that threat.
The Monolith design for Habari's admin had been on the slate for a long time, even prior to Michael Heilemann's announcement back in February. We've been striving toward user interface excellence. While there's been a lot of contention by those concerned over what constitutes the best design, I think it's impossible to deny that the design is handsome.
The Monolith source code had lingered in a branch of the source repository awaiting the day when it would be mature enough to merge. It became clear to me that although opening branches of our repository for non-PMC (Primary Management Committee) coders to work on special-interest changes to the core code was good for innovation, it wasn't necessarily as inviting in the spirit of our community-contribution nature.
So after a couple of months progress, and with the blessings of several other PMC members, I made good on the threat of merging the Monolith code to the main branch of the code repository, and over the past two weeks the flurry of contributions has been nothing short of amazing. more
I am working on finishing up Habari's WordPress importing facilities. This is the middle step in a long chain of personal development that is probably being done somewhat out of order, just because some things need to be complete sooner than the things they depend on.
For example, I need to have a working body of sample posts to test any work I do on a database independent library for Habari. Habari is database independent now, but we're intent on building an abstraction class so that you can plug in new databases as needed instead of having to code any database-specific stuff directly into the core. In all, it's a good idea. So I need test data.
Also, some folks have suggested that there will be more incentive to make things work better if I'm forced to use the software. Personally, I'd be happy to use Habari for Asymptomatic, but there is one problem... Getting my old blog data into the system....
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WordPress 2.0 isn't out yet, but every day that I spend on the #wordpress IRC channel, I see this question go by at least once:
What is new in WordPress 2.0 from 1.5?
Wouldn't you like to know?
One important note before we begin: Many of the changes in WordPress from 1.5 to 2.0 are under the hood. They are things that you're not going to notice unless you are developer. There are some features that casual users will notice that are significant, but (in my opinion) most of the real change has happened where most people won't see.
As a result, there is a fundamental thing to understand here. What often looks like catering to plugin developers is actually of benefit to common users, because with the enhanced capabilities of the underlying engine it becomes possible to make better extensions faster than we could before. The underlying engine has been made to work better. There have been times while doing contract work on 1.5.x installations where two days of work were necessary to accomplish something that I could have done in 1.6 (now 2.0) in about 10 minutes. Seriously.
There has been a lot of talk in the WP scene about feature bloat, and it's my own opinion that certain aspects of 2.0 are wildly overrated for what they do, but from an underlying technology standpoint, WordPress 2.0 is incredibly superior to the 1.5 codebase.
So if you don't want to upgrade because you don't think that 2.0 offers you anything, just wait a couple months until the really fun plugins start appearing.
Enough said on that. On with the new features list, which is by no means comprehensive: more
