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.
Since the merge of the Monolith code, there have been 99 commits. That’s roughly one commit every three hours for the past two weeks. The Habari committers in timezones around the world are actually committing code 24 hours a day, too.
In that time, we’ve also seen some terrific advancement besides the implementation of many of Monolith’s more interesting features. As I write this, we’re merging the source for our 100th commit in the past two weeks, which will enable Postgres database support. This makes for three database engines that Habari will officially support - a true, multi-engine package.
We’ve also just added s9y imports, which will be a great way for s9y users to try out Habari by importing their data. I’m looking forward to more importers for other popular blogging packages.
There are now 57 plugins in the Habari “extras” repository. The extras repo is a place where Habari plugin developers can collaborate on plugins released under the ASL license. So the 57 count, while amazing, doesn’t even include the plugins that don’t qualify for inclusion in our repo due to licensing.
Themes are starting to crop up everywhere. Since 0.4’s release, we’ve added two new themes to the core distribution. “Charcoal” is a Habari signature release, demonstrating the craft and style of the Habari platform. “mzingi” is a stripped-down starting point for new themes that includes just the basics. Today on the mailing list was announced the Habari port of the venerable Hemingway theme.
What’s been really amazing to me is the participation level of the people in the community. There have been an influx of tickets on found issues, which is really helpful to finding things that need refinement. There have been patches supplied from many folks. Committers really have been working in overdrive to round out the impending 0.5 version, and I think the whole thing is barreling unstoppably toward release.
I always try to make an effort to thank anyone who contributes to the project. It really feels great working together with people towards a larger goal. I think in that respect is where Habari is a winning project. For some reason, they often thank me for applying their patches. I think it’s important that they are thanked for taking interest and writing them in the first place.
The idea that people can talk about their experience with Habari on Twitter, and someone from the project will help them with issues, comment on their new site, or just chat about what they thought. And it’s not just me doing all the work!
I think people hear me talking so adamantly about Habari and assume that it’s some personal obsession in which I - and only me - am completely absorbed. It’s not just me. There is a growing, thriving community behind the scenes that makes it all work. It’s the coolest part!
I encourage you to get involved. Habari wouldn’t be the great app it is right now if not for the people who’ve come on to help. And it can only get better with more ideas and more hands working.
