Ooooh shiny
I have plenty of work to do all day long; and I have plenty of things to occupy my free time. I should have spent this evening working on Habari, or preparing for a Drupal presentation I'll be giving next week. Instead, I spent way too long fiddling around with the Google Maps API for a project for Ohio LinuxFest. This was the first time I've ever intentionally worked with Javascript, so I suppose the experience wasn't without benefit to me.
Why Habari?
Last night we celebrated Passover with Carina's folks, and her uncle Tim. This was my first Seder, and it was a very interesting experience. Tim did a great job explaining everything, and answering all of my questions. I've never really done much with respect to Jewish holidays, so it was a very educational evening.
On the way home, Tayler started asking me about Habari. Both of the girls have heard me speaking of it to Carina in weeks past, but neither showed much interest. Saturday, though, Tayler learned I was working on my April Fool's Joke, and became very curious about Habari; so her questions last night didn't really take me by surprise.
Tayler was interested to know why I was working on Habari. I explained that when I first started using WordPress, there was a very vibrant community of people working together to solve problems. It was an exciting time, and there was a lot of creativity being shared and encouraged. I really liked that. As time went on, I explained, the guy in charge of WordPress started a company, and he became less and less interested in other people's ideas. He only seemed to like the ideas he came up with. So, Chris, Rich, Owen and I all agreed to start working on Habari, so that we could get back to that spirit of collaboration and openness.
Tayler then asked "Is Habari better than WordPress?" I answered honestly: not yet, because it's so new, and WordPress has been around for a couple of years. But I'm confident that Habari will get better for several reasons. First, the way we're making Habari is -- we think -- more flexible than the way WordPress was built. Time will tell whether we're right. Second, we think we're much more accommodating of other people's ideas: we want people to participate and share their ideas, and we know that we're not the only ones with good ideas.
At this point, Tayler interrupted to say "I don't think the guy in charge of WordPress is very creative." This is such a typical example of the twins' thought process: she was really asking a question, but stated it in a declarative manner. I gently rebuked her: No, I don't think that at all. I don't know enough about the guy to know whether he's creative or not. He has some good ideas, but I just don't agree with the way he operates.
I continued to explain that WordPress, because it's being partly driven by a company now, is less open to new participants and their potential contributions. With Habari, we genuinely want people to share their ideas with us, and we ultimately want to allow those people to add their new ideas on their own, without requiring us to do it for them. I detailed briefly the way in which our committer base has grown in the last couple of months, because people with good ideas have been invited to help us work directly on the code. Tyler joined in the conversation at this point, and exclaimed that she wanted to help with Habari! After a moment's pause she hung her head and said sadly "But I'm too little." I had to stifle a giggle: she was so cute. "It's not that you're too little, Tyler. It's just that you don't know how to program in PHP!"
The discussion continued on for quite some time, reaching the ultimate conclusion that both the girls want to use Habari instead of WordPress. I'm delighted that they're so interested in my hobby, and it really reinvigorates me to have a couple of people close to me really supporting my efforts.
April Fool's Follow-Up
So yesterday's post, Goodbye Habari, was clearly an April Fool's joke. Owen let me in on his plans for ForkPress late Friday night. When I was done laughing out loud, I asked if I could help him. We quickly concocted the K3 theme, and then the bbqPress forum package. I'm pleased with how well our joke was received. A few folks looked like they fell for it pretty early on, but most people took it in good spirits. I particularly enjoyed Andy's sense of humor about the whole thing.
All of these sites are running Habari (and in the case of bbqPress, it's also running bbpress, the package it's spoofing). Owen's running ForkPress on his own, and I'm running K3 and bbqPress on the same server that drives skippy.net. Both of my fake sites are running from a single installation of Habari, taking advantage of the multisite support built into Habari. Here's the directory structure:
habari/user/sites/bbqpress.com
habari/user/sites/bbqpress.com/themes/bbqpress
habari/user/sites/getk3.com
habari/user/sites/getk3.com/themes/getk3
Of course, K3 is merely K2 with a 500px header. And the bbqPress theme is merely a different set of colors from the ForkPress theme. If you're just getting started with Habari, feel free to study these for template examples.k3_theme.zipbbqpress_theme.zip(Note that the images are excluded from the bbqPress theme archive because they were not licensed for redistribution in this way.)
All in all, this was a fun way to officially launch Habari. I'm looking forward to seeing what happens next.
Goodbye Habari
I've just switched skippy.net over to Habari, and I'm already sick of it. I know there are bugs in all software -- especially alpha software like Habari -- but this is beyond the pale. I can't get the list of pages to sort in alphabetical order, for example. I mean, that's such a basic, trivial aspect of output that I shouldn't need to spend any time on it!
Habari is also wildly complicated compared to everything else (except maybe Drupal). There are up to five levels of abstraction, making you search through class file after class file to figure out what happens where. Oh sure, Owen was able to produce recent comments in 7 lines of code, but he's a maniac programmer. The average blogger is never going to be able to do that. I wrote the bulk of the multi-site system for Habari, modeled closely after Drupal's, but the inability to use a single user table between sites is a tremendous shortcoming. That deficiency means I won't be able to use Habari for my kids' blogs.
Just as soon as I can, I'm going to install and configure ForkPress. Owen has graciously allowed me to glom onto his project, and I'm excited to spend some time focusing on my new passion: K3! I'm going to take a break from all of this PHP and try my hand at CSS.
