Habari Project

First Post

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:16:36 +0000

The powered flight took a total of about eight and a half minutes. It seemed to me it had gone by in a lash. We had gone from sitting still on the launch pad at the Kennedy Space Center to traveling at 17,500 miles an hour in that eight and a half minutes.

It is still mind-boggling to me. I recall making some statement on the air-to-ground radio for the benefit of my fellow astronauts, who had also been in the program a long time, that it was well worth the wait.

Intro Message

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:21:23 +0000

About Habari: Habari is a collaborative open source blogging platform in active development. With Habari, you are given the power to create a blog or web journal of your own. We invite you to learn more about what Habari can do for you, then take it for a test drive.

SVN Downloads

Sun, 11 Feb 2007 05:22:38 +0000

Habari has not yet been released for download, but may be by the end of the day. You can obtain a copy of Habari via SVN at the Google Code repository.

Habari 0.1 DR

Fri, 30 Mar 2007 17:30:26 +0000

The Habari Community is proud to announce the immediate availability of version 0.1 of the Habari Blogging Platform.

Version 0.1 is a Developers Release: this version won't have all the bells and whistles, but it is a fully functioning version of our codebase. The Developer Release is meant for those of you who would like to take it for a spin and see what makes it tick. It is not recommended you use the DR for a production site.

Please report any issues found on the issue tracker, seek help on the users list, or the IRC channel and above all have fun.

Habari roundup - 28th April, 2007

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 07:54:23 +0000

It's been almost one month since Forkpress, BBQPress were released to the world. Owen and Skippy decided to walk away from the bickering that was Habari and start their very own blogging software. (link)

No, wait. That was an April Fools Joke.

But seriously, the Habari developer preview was released a day later. Subsequently, there was a XSS notice which resulted in the release of a fixed 0.1.1 - it is worth reiterating that anyone running 0.1 on a public site should upgrade. Like immediately or yesterday, whichever comes first.

In the month since, there has been varied and interesting discussion on the mailing lists. In terms of features, we had a spiffy new comment moderation page, miscellaneous fixes and enhancements (including a useful addition to Utils which allows developers to use Firebug). People have been busily writing in the wiki ever since a plea for more documentation was made several weeks ago. We've also had a request for Smarty theme examples answered by pkeane and recently BigJibby also produced a modification which adds support for PHPTal.

In the last week, Owen tossed out an interesting link that Japanese was the most important blogging language... and Andew Da Silva's extraordinarily generous plea for plugin/feature requests saw more activity.

There was also a UI change to the admin menu proposed by Owen (thread). Some main points in the dicussion which resulted agreed that cohesion of UI elements and consistency was important. Some basic elements in summary appeared in Khaled's response. Khaled then whipped out his own spiffy looking enhancement to awe, wolf whistles and sighs of "Oooh shiny". Even more importantly, the guidelines governing UI layout were expressed in point form here and here.

Another related discussion was on Editing Tools; where Scott Merrill made the important observation that Habari intends to be neutral as far as WYSIWYG editors are concerned.

"We think that WYSIWYG editing should be handled by plugins. Plugins can be made for all of the popular editing libraries. Plugins are not bound to be compatible with our license. Plugins can extend the editing tools in unique ways."

And yes, the prolific Andrew Da Silva, Kristin Pishdadi and Scott Merrill also participated in a thread on rewrite rules which I fear whizzed straight over my head. You can read more about it here.

More news and another roundup of habari-dev next week.

Habari Philosophy: Content

Fri, 18 May 2007 16:40:10 +0000

I want to talk a little about some of the common problems faced by bloggers and developers today, and how we are hoping to solve them in Habari. These little vignettes will be more geared toward conceptual understanding, and not so much code review... although I am sure I will be including some code here and there for illustration.

So, the first one on the cutting block, is the most important in my opinion: Content.

Your content, my content, everybodies content

Creating content is the meat and potatoes of blogging, am I right? We post, podcast, screencast and photocast. Just to name a few.

The thing is, each of those possibilities I just listed are much different beasts. Posts are not like podcasts and podcasts are certainly not like screencasts. And these are just what we are doing today. What happens when next year the new phenomenon is Boogity Boo... casting.

Above all, be flexible

That is really the name of the game here. In order to remain viable as the landscape changes, we need to be able to adapt. In the past this meant shoe horning new types of content into the post/page paradigm. We think that allowing your users to define what content they will work with, and how it will be handled is the better way to go. For this reason Habari is in many ways content agnostic. If you would like to start boogity-casting, you simply define that new content type via a plugin, and tell habari what to do with it.

This type of flexibility means that Habari will be able to roll with the times quite comfortably. It also means, I hope, that Habari will give people the chance to dream big dreams and come up with novel content types and new ways to interact with content.

Schedules and Logs

Tue, 29 May 2007 13:10:43 +0000

Work continues on Habari, as we add new features. Two important new additions are a scheduling system and logging of events. Matt Read (BigJibby) contributed a scheduling system. Named after the venerable cron system of UNIX, this new class allows Habari to schedule recurring events to occur at defined intervals. This is great for regular maintenance, and provides an important first step toward support for "future publishing" -- that is, saving a post that is scheduled to be viewable only at some point in the future. Scheduled tasks might be used to automatically purge deleted items older than a certain value; to automatically purge spam comments; or to delete stale log entries. Another important new feature of Habari is an event log. An event log is an invaluable troubleshooting tool, and also provides a nice way to audit who has done what on the site. The current implementation is bare-bones, but it will soon be expanded to provide robust logging. To record a log entry, you (currently) use the log() method in the Utils class, like this: Utils::log( 'This is a log item', 'info', 'default', 'habari' ); The log() method accepts the following parameters:

message: the short message to record

severity: one of debug, info, notice, warning, err, crit, alert, emerg

type: see below

module: the module which defines the specified type. See below for more

data: an optional field for larger datasets (say, a full backtrace or var_export() )

Each log entry has a type, or classification for the kind of message that it is. Habari defines a number of basic types ("default", "authentication", etc) for basic log entries that Habari will record. Plugins can register additional types, so that a plugin can record information meaningful to it. Event types are further classified against their module, in order to disambiguate two types of the same name. For example, a plugin to support LDAP logins might register its own "authentication" type. By using the plugin name as the value of "module", the Habari logging mechanism can keep track of log entries for both the default "authentication" type and the LDAP login "authentication" type. Work is underway to build the display necessary to view, sort, and search log entries.

Flashback June 4 - June 10, 2007

Mon, 11 Jun 2007 18:26:45 +0000

Here are the summaries of posts to Habari-dev and issues posted this week. Enjoy.

Habari-Dev Posts

In "Future Posts" Scott Merrill began a discussion regarding posts which would be displayed at a future time. It was mentioned that this may be partially dependent on timezone handling as well.

In "div IDs" Scott Merrill asked if there were a simple way to style draft and deleted posts differently now that they are displayed when logged in. A few suggestions, and a patch for culling old deleted posts were posted in response.

In "Comment feed" tinyau posted some questions regarding the links to feeds for comments. A few solutions were presented regarding individual post feeds, as well as site comment feeds.

In "WP Import problems in recent revisions" Christian Mohn posted a request for help importing data from Wordpress SVN into the latest revisions of Habari. Several suggestions were provided.

In "Organized effort between projects to get hosts to make PHP5 available to customers." Christian Mohn posted a suggestion in participating in an effort to encourage web hosts to make PHP5 available to users. There were several positive responses to this idea. It was pointed out that being involved with other, more well known projects would help bring some notice to Habari,as well as the fact that Habari requires PHP5, so wider adoption would allow a larger userbase for Habari.

Issues

In #329 "The requested URL was not found on this server." admin.tiny posted that they were unable to get habari to run properly. It was suggested that mod_rewrite needed to be enabled as well as possibly AllowOverride

In #330 "Logged In User Can't Preview Drafts" smerrill posted that he was no longer able to view drafts by entering their direct URL. He posted a patch to change this behavior.

In #331 "more function inserting extra closing div" bishopblogworks posted that using the automatic "more" function created an extra closing </div> wheras adding the  tag manually did not.

In #332 "Wordpress Importer imports WP user, but not the user record" h0bbel posted that when importing from WP, the userID was not being imported correctly, thus creating error because Habari was seeking a non-existent author.

In #333 "Search Chinese don't work" tinyau.vampire posted that when searching using Chinese characters the search function returns all posts.

In #334 "URL Objects" matt.r.read posted a patch for allowing more flexible permalink structure to be available to users. The patch was given a few minor revisions.

Flashback June 11-24

Mon, 25 Jun 2007 17:23:56 +0000

Sorry about the missed update last week. This update covers the last two weeks.

Habari-Dev posts

In Problems with k2 in new svn version Mumbles posted an issue with links and a theme error

In hp.o Scott Merrill suggested a /devblog rule for HabariProject.org

In [habari-issues] Issue 255 in habari: Malformed URI for multi-worded tags Scott Merrill requested a review of patches submitted.

In String concatenation vs Objects Andrew da Silva requested clarification on Habari's standards for when to use Objects rather than Sting Concatenation. Owen Winkler Provided some insight.

In Comment Feed tinyau pointed to a patch to resolve the problem.

In Access Control Lists - Part 1 Andrew da Silva presented some ideas about Access Control Lists, and posted a patch

In unknown post creation and theme change Scott Merrill posted a warning of a potential security breach. Other possible explanations were presented.

In userinfo Scott Merrill wondered if $user->update() should always commit

In Character Set Handling tinyau asked about default character sets for Habari Databases.

In Habari as Photo Gallery Sean T Evans posted an example of using Habari as a Photo Gallery.

In Questions about plugin and Posts tinyau posted a question regarding how plugins are able to interact with posts.

In Problem of rewrite rules & Posts::get() method tinyau described some problems with custom permalinks and a plugin, a workaround was suggested. There is some question about the need to change the behavior of Post::get

Issues

In #335 Support for caching it was suggested that support be added early in the design process for caching to make it accessible to plugins.

in #336 Add custom property 'atom_comments' to Post tinyau.vampire posted a patch to allow $post->atom_comments to return a feed for comments on a post.

In #337 Post Status Modifications smerrill suggests changing the post status values to make it easier to enforce API standards

In #338 Habari project home doesn't link to wiki nor google code page claestw points out that neither the Google Code Page nor the HabariProject.org wiki are linked to on the main page of HabariProject.org

Flashback June 25-July 1 2007

Mon, 02 Jul 2007 21:18:27 +0000

Here's this weeks activity on the Habari-Dev mailing list and the issue tracker. "Summer Is Upon Us" edition.

Habari-Dev Posts

In Plugin - RN Code Escape tinyau posted an plugin to escape certain characters when pasting code into a post. h0bbel thought that syntax highlighting would be a nice addition.

In Spam-prevention Plugin Idea Owen Winkler posted an idea of using Safe Browsing to help fight spam, it's effectiveness was debated and a few other spam reduction techniques were also discussed.

In Working theme failed in rev 715 sfong15 discovered that some of the theme file structure had, but there was no warning to that effect when updating, therefore the site failed to load properly. Some integrity checking was recommended, as well as a request for documentation development.

In OpenID humaneasy wondered about the possibility of implementing OpenID from the start in Habari. There are some licensing issues involved, but support does exist for this idea.

In Questions about <code>...</code> block in comment and feed tinyau posted some questions about the behavior of <code> blocks in feed and comments. The automatic filtering seemed to prevent these blocks from working properly.

In fresh installaltion with rev 716, admin>plugins failed sfong15 described an issue with the plugins page when installing on Vista.

In Wiki pages Sean T Evans posted links to to wiki pages he has built to try to help track some in progress work, as well as a developer directory.

In Plugin - RN Related Posts tinau posted an announcement of a new plugin for related posts.

Issues

No new issues were posted this week. Does that mean Habari is perfect. :) Maybe it's just summer.