Have you heard about Habari? If you’re a regular reader here, then of course you have. What you might not know is that Habari development is not dead.
It’s weird how a summer can bring a natural stall to the activities usually relegated to the development spawned by countless hours of hibernating indoors. To outside appearances, it might not look like a lot is going on with Habari. Even though commits continue to trickle in, but it’s not the full-blown force that it was six months ago. I’ll assure you now that the project is still quite alive, and that we’ve even got release news to back that up.
Today we released version 0.2 for developers. This is another release that is meant to be a review for people that want to be ready to develop for Habari when the 1.0 version is released, or want to start shaping the software early on. You can run it on a live site if you’re daring (I do here), but I wouldn’t go as far as to recommend it. So, what all have we been doing in Habari, then? I’ll tell you.
Of course, you can learn a bit about the new release at the main web site, and Skippy writes a lot about what new things we’ve added since our last distribution. But there’s so much new stuff. We’ve also added cascading templates, so that you can build a theme for displaying your content that can be as simple as a single template for everything to specific as a separate template for each post. We added hooks to augment our Atom feeds via plugin. The plugin page itself has been improved so that every plugin has a dedicated page to house its own form controls. Rewrite rules have been much overhauled to vast improvement in flexibility. The interactive manual, although small for now, is included in the download.
The list of new stuff goes so far beyond what we’ve all listed that I’m even shocked to see all of the work we’ve done since the last release. Why didn’t we release something earlier?
We’ve had a lot of great help getting this release out over the past few months, but recently Chris and Skippy drew the 0.2 release finish line and started hauling toward it. Michael has put a good bit of work transferring wiki entries into the TiddlyWiki format that Khaled originally presented to use for our manual. Sean has been posting weekly summaries of our mailing list, and wrote our announcement post on the Habari Project site. And I need to thank all of the coders who spent the last few months cranking out the software both in supplying code and submitting bugs and ideas.
But the question I really want to ask now is, What’s next?
What I’ve been working on personally for the past few weeks is a new design for the Habari Project site itself. I hope to get the design online this weekend sometime, but these goals have been slipping for a while with work occupying time. It’s not just the graphical design of the site, but a new thematic purpose for a community site based around the software. I’ll probably have to elaborate on that idea when it’s done.
As for the code, plans are already in the works for the new access control system. We’ve discussed the ideas of communication between sites, and are hyped to build Pingback support on top of our brand new ASL-licensed XMLRPC layer. The admin design should continue aggressively for version 0.3, building on the great start we already have.
Personally, I’d like to grab the media API, wrestle it to the ground, and tie it off. I’ve got big plans for that, and I’m anxious to make it all work with our friends from Viddler. (Chris and I have already decided to use Viddler for screencasts on the HP.o site blog when it relaunches.)
It’s exciting times for our project, as we roll around to our one year anniversary. Many of us are gathering in Columbus for Ohio LinuxFest at the end of September, which should be a great event in itself. Meeting with the Habari folks again will be a great bonus.
I hope you are looking forward to participating in the future of Habari like we are!
