Habari is a new PHP5, object-oriented, database independent blog project that includes some people who have contributed to WP in the past. Should be worth keeping an eye on once they get a release out, it reminds me a lot of Drupal meets Serendipity.
The name seemed familiar – then I recalled there is a Mozilla feedreader-thingy called Habari Xenu: http://habarixenu.mozdev.org/
Matt, I believe Chris is planning to do a write-up soon, but do you have any insight into why these people have decided to switch, what the differences / goals might be and whether it’s a fork or a fresh start?
I get the feeling there are politics here I don’t understand – if anyone would like to fill me in I’d appreciate it.
Sometimes it’s just more fun to work on something brand new. As far as I know, Chris is the only blog in the world running the software on a real site, so I don’t think anyone is really switching yet, though I imagine their devs will once there’s a stable release, probably in about half a year. It shares no code with WP.
As for the politics, I’m fully supporting the Habari project. In fact if they need any server resources or similar I’d be happy to help out. (Out of over a hundred servers I’m sure we could spare one or two.)
Congrats, you are now a mature open source project.
As some one who has seen this happen a few times before, don’t worry. It’s a story as old as the GPL, I’d guess these guys were bitter they got passed over when you hired from the community. A new generation of volunteers will fill any space they left because sometimes it’s “more fun” to work on software that lots of people actually use and far more companies than Automatic will be hiring WP devs soon.
If you’re lucky, this will happen about once a year, like a snake shedding its skin. There’s no need to be so cordial, either.
My main suggestion would be to do more frequent releases and OS any code you haven’t yet from the hosted version. Also try to improve what you think are the main reasons people like WP.
– A 10 year OS veteran
Mark: There’s some politicking involved, certainly, but it has nothing to do with not being hired by Automattic, as Chris opined. The four of us who started Habari are all gainfully (and happily, I might add) employed. We’re not looking to make jobs out of writing blogging software.
Habari is not a fork. We’re starting over. To fork WordPress would have been far more work, since WordPress is neither fully oriented, not database neutral. By starting fresh, we plan to incorporate those ideas and methods that have been proven successful by current-generation blogging tools, while building a reliable framework for real innovation to deal with next-generation challenges. Things like anti-spam and Digg site overloads are solved by band-aids in current tools. We’re planning to incorporate their solutions into the very core of Habari. We’re also planning some innovative ideas of our own, to make Habari an interesting choice from the pool of available blog packages.
Matt: thanks for the offer to host. At this time, we’re in good shape; but your generosity is recognized, and appreciated.
As for a stable release: we expect to have something out rather sooner than six months. We’ve already got an excellent database independent foundation, a robust OOP plugin system, and a fully-functional WordPress importer (the first of many importers, no doubt). I’ll be switching my site over as soon as the templating engine is nailed down (any day now).
I would agree with what Skippy said, except suggesting anti-spam and scalability are “band-aids” in WordPress, which is something I would pretty passionately disagree with.
Thanks everyone for your responses. I think Chris’ comments on software ecosystems is apt.