skippy dot net

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.zip
bbqpress_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.

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.