We’ve done some pretty cool work on Habari’s administrative interface over the last months, and I’d like to take a few minutes of your time to walk you through it.
Oh, and if you like what you see, please, by all means, link back here, drop some comments on Viddler and let everyone know about this, because we want to get more people hyped about Habari, and you’re the key to making that happen.
PS: Download the 93MB quicktime file for full non-aliased pleasure.
Alright, listen up. Binary Bonsai has been powered by WordPress literally since its very first release. And as a consequence, I’ve been pretty involved with the WordPress community over time, especially these last few years with K2 (which is still in production I might add). But, while it has served me well for all of that time, to kick the carcase of the dead horse that is the girlfriend metaphor; we’ve grown apart. And today, I’m moving out of the apartment. So it’s goodbye WordPress and…
Hello Habari.
Mmm. Sweet, sensual, built Habari. Don’t get me wrong; this isn’t a pitch for you to do the same (though, please, take it for a spin; you never know). It’s simply me celebrating that I’ve finally gotten on with my online life, and getting even more involved with a project that has so far been both incredibly rewarding and ditto challenging.
And it wasn’t that WordPress and I were in a painful relationship; at least not in last year or so. It was more one of those courteous ones where we had both made peace with the fact that we weren’t meant for each other. That over time, we had grown apart. And… Alright, alright; enough of this blasted girlfriend metaphor; it’s creeping me out!
Seriously though, I’m really happy to finally move in with Habari. I’ve long had a keen interest in interface design and blogging tools, and my involvement with Habari has allowed me to follow up on both of those, and hopefully in the process creating a blogging tool that others will find exciting as well.
As a writer, if anyone would stoop so low as to call me that (thank you), what happens behind the scenes doesn’t really interest me. I do most of my writing in Textmate and then copy/paste it anyway. And after I’ve turned off comments, I don’t even see the whole admin section that often. But just because you only use the car to go down to the supermarket, why shouldn’t you be driving a black Countach?
I thought so too.
But please, have some patience with the design (which is new, and very much in progress), the archives and the feed (new permanent address, I’ll try and do some clever rewriting to get the old links to work). I’m working on getting all my ducks in a neat little row, and hopefully everything will settle down within a few days.
Well, except for the design.
I’m calling it Kalamari.
I’m sorry for this past week’s permission-problem-outage, but despite having vacation, it’s been everything but quiet around here. And before we get on to other business, let me just take one more opportunity to congratulate Rasmus and Anna-Vera on their wedding this weekend, it was fantastic!
Now, down to business.
I think I’ll try and upgrade BB to WP 2.6 one of the next few days, just to have the chance to play around with it properly, before finally taking the leap up to the just release Habari 0.5. I don’t know if you’ve had the chance to play around with it yet, but I’m so very proud to have been a part of that project so far. The work we’ve done these last few months is really something. There’s also a new project site, which is quite an improvement already.
So that’s coming along strong. I can’t wait to get it up and running on BB; I’m really just waiting for Chris to do the textile plugin he promised me… (nudge nudge, eh eh?).
Now, I’ve got some drafts for various entries I didn’t get to post over the last week, but now that the weather in Copenhagen has turned from LA to Seattle, what else is there to do but honker down and get some writing done?
Well, there’s watching movies, reading books and cooking food, but… Well, I’ll get them written, alright? I get enough whine from my friends about the activity-level on here already, so I guess I need to pick it up a bit, eh?
In the meanwhile, Steve Lam has been working quietly behind the scenes, and just released a new release candidate (haha… We just like the sound of it) of K2 yesterday, all 2.6 ready and everything. Knock yourself out!
And in closing: Twitter killed the blog. It’s true.
It’s with great joy, that I can link to the newly released Habari 0.5. It took less than half a year to go from an idea to a fully fledged and wonderfully implemented Monolith.
I might have done the design, but I could never have pulled off the implementation, which was not only a team effort, but a sight to behold.
Work is being done on a demo version, but for now, I hope you’ll take out the time to try it out on your own. I think you might like it.
I’m back from Rome in one piece, albeit paradoxically now in serious need of a vacation. Touristing it is hard work.
Just before I left, a few thing happened in relation to Habari and Monolith, which I didn’t find the time to comment on, but which may be of interest to those of you following the progress of these two projects.
First of all, I was cordially invited to become a member of the Habari cabal, which — roughly speaking — grants me access to the trunk of the subversion repository for Habari as well as voting rights in discussions on the in- or exclusion of for instance plugins, themes and any other such matter.
This is really helpful in fact, because where the Monolith codebase had previously existed on its own branch in the subversion repository, it was recently rolled right into the trunk. A gutsy move, which I think started paying itself off almost immediately, as the patches have been continually pouring in since then (and I’ve been keeping track of them from my iPhone while in Rome).
I’ve hardly even had the chance to play with it myself, let alone contribute any code; but I’m excited as hell at the prospect of having a fully functional Monolith in the very foreseeable future.
I’ll try and keep the updates flowing as work progresses, though you are of course more than welcome to try it on for size.
