Habari Watch

News

Last week saw a momentous event taking place, an event so important and significant that, in years to come, people will be able to remember exactly where they were and what they were doing when this historic event took place, an event attended in person by (literally) hundreds of thousands of people and watched by a global audience of millions.

I refer, of course, to the Habari Hack-A-Thon. During a weekend of frenetic hacking, there were 53 commits, 11 tickets closed and 4 new tickets opened. Michael C. Harris also points out, that once you get these developers out of bed, there is simply no holding them and momentum was continued in the following week with a further 23 commits, 8 tickets closed and 11 new tickets.

So what's changed ? The main functional area was the introduction of the foundation for Access Control Lists (ACL's) which will appear in Habari 0.6. While the core ACL code is in place, the Administration interface is not fully complete yet and people note some performance impacts in blogs with a large number of posts. So, remember kids, tracking HEAD is living on the bleeding edge and the ride can be bumpy at times.

Another great feature for users was the introduction of plugin help. When the plugin function help() is defined, a stylish '?' help icon appears alongside the plugin which the online help.

Plugins

A very popular and oft requested feature is the ability to subscribe to comments and recent Habari convert, Steve Love, has released an initial version of a 'Subscribe to Comments' plugin so please download and try it out.

Everyone knows that all the cool µ-blogging cats hang out on identi.ca which also had a major update with the release of 0.7 last week. Josh kindly released a generic Laconi.ca plugin for Habari that works with any Laconi.ca install, displays your latest notice and cross-posts blog posts to your identi.ca stream.

If you're interested in differences between Twitter and identi.ca, Andy C posted a handy summary you can print out and pin-up on your office cube. Be sure to read it, the next time Twitter's down.

identi.ca 0.7 also introduced another feature Twitter is sadly lacking - groups - so, once you've signed up for identi.ca, please join the embryonic !habari group.

Themes

Chris Meller has been busy updating Randy Walker's simple, clean Simpler theme (available from the -extras repository)

A Mister Norman Brightside (all the way from London, near England) writes in to the show and confesses that his long neglected port of Brian Gardner's Whitespace theme for Habari has also been updated so that comments (moderated, closed) now actually work together with minor changes for Habari 0.6 (alpha).

Habari-sphere

Andrew Rickmann makes every single Habari user cry by releasing details of his Onion project which will be of interest to any creative types (including potential WordPress converts) curious about effective theme development for Habari.

Habari is a distributed, international project. Habari is Unicode enabled with a growing set of language translations and locales being contributed by the user community.

In addition, German and Italian readers are recommended to run - don't walk - over to

• Habariblog.it (Italian)
• Habari Mag (German)

Tip: If you use Google Reader, you can subscribe to both of these blogs and simply select 'Feed-View Settings-Translate into my language' and enjoy the content along with the occasional amusing incorrect translation !