Habari Watch

News

The next release of Habari will be version 0.6 to be released in the next couple of months. In an concerted effort to fix some bugs and try to accelerate development, the community are holding a Hack-A-Thon this weekend. Don't be misled by the rather paltry response on the Habari Wiki page with just a single volunteer thus far. As with most developers, it's the code that matters, the documentation can wait.

You don't have to be a PHP wizard (wizard-ess) to take part in the Hack-A-Thon. If you feel you can improve the documentation, translate Habari into another language or help test out the bug fixes to see what else they break, please step forward and throw your HAT into the ring.

The documentation set for the Habari API has been dusted off (and now uses doxygen) and should now magically regenerate itself on a regular basis.

Habari has a number of channels available for users and developers to communicate and a set of forums (stealthily launched before Christmas) are now given higher visibility by being linked directly from both Google mailing lists. It will be interesting to see whether (potential) Habari users adopt the forums in preference to the mailing lists. So why not register now and upload a photo to the rogue's gallery (NSFW :-)

Plugins

Benjamin Hutchins has written a wonderful plugin for Habari - Clickheat. This plugin tracks user activity on your blog but offers a different perspective from conventional Web analytics packages; Clickheat records actual clicks and shows precisely where readers have clicked - the higher the number of clicks, the hotter the spot.

I have only recently started to use IM (call me 'Johnny Come Lately') and I use it for tracking terms (well just Habari, actually) on identi.ca and chatting to loads of people (well, just Michael C. Harris actually). However, lots of clever people use IM for everything and if it can't be done using XMPP, they simply don't do it.

Ryan Mullins shares his very interesting 'XMPP Notify' plugin for Habari that sends an IM notification whenever a new blog comment is received. Obviously this is just a start and there is considerable scope for additional functionality in the future.

Themes

Josh Wood makes the decision to track the latest Habari release (using subversion) and does everyone a favour by providing versions of his excellent 'sp' theme which works with the latest stable version as well as the latest development version.

Rick Cockrum manages to sneak in a new theme on his Habari blog with a very impressive port of the Darkwater theme for Habari. Run - don't walk - to Sag Rising to see the theme in action and subscribe to Rick's excellent blog while you're there.

Habari-sphere

Andrew Rickmann gives a lengthy, wide ranging and interesting interview to Blogger Talks and this comment gave food for thought

'In my day job no one really has blogs or even knows about twitter, so these things aren’t mainstream.'

I am sure that is also very true for my company and I work in IT !

Andrew is also a talented photographer and if you're contemplating Habari but are bemoaning the lack of professional, stylish, gallery style Habari themes to show off your work, just sit back and admire Andrew's photo gallery at Fun With Photographs. Powered by Habari, of course.

Over on identi.ca, there is a healthy increase in mentions (mainly by me admittedly) of Habari where Evan thinks Habari needs a plugin for the recently launched open source, freedom loving anti-spam solution - blogspam.net.