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.