echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

3,400 projects were nominated. 72 have made it this far. Only 12 will survive.

I've had the 2008 SourceForge Community Choice Awards badge on my site since nominations opened. I thought it was pretty cool when I found out earlier this week that Habari had been chosen as a finalist in the Best New Project category, but I was even more pleased when I got an email from SourceForge saying there had been 3,400 nominations, and we're in the final 12 of our category. I don't know many of the other projects nominated, but I guess that's the point of the Best New Project category.

So head on over to SourceForge and vote for your favourite project. Hopefully that's Habari, but good luck to all the projects!

It seems like an eternity ago that the Habari admin was replaced with Monolith, and all in all, I think it's a good thing. We've had some great additions to the Habari community who have been really kicking it along and ironing out the bugs. Though I did miss though the incoming links on the dashboard. You might call me vain, but it was nice to be able to see who was linking to my site. Sometimes they were new Habari users who were using one of my plugins or themes, and I could pop over and say hi ...

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I've updated the Publish Quote plugin for Habari, and donated it to the Habari community. It now takes advantage of features added in Habari 0.5 alpha, so that you can set a template for the title as well as the content and specify tags that should be added to your quote entries. Let me know if you have any feature requests. It would also be great to hear from anyone who's using the plugin.

If all goes according to plan, this should be my first post integrating Disqus comments into my blog. I've written a very simple Habari Disqus plugin that puts Disqus comments on posts that have no existing comments. Where there are previous comments, the native comment system will be used. At the moment, it's a bit fragile, as your theme needs to use a template called comments.php to display normal comments. I'm hoping that someone else will take an interest and improve upon the basic start.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote about the spike in developer activity after the merging of the Monolith admin theme into the Habari trunk (though I kind of regret the tremor reference, given the pain in China). Things have continued apace since then, and Owen has written a great post about what's been happening. Again, none of this would be possible, or anywhere near as interesting, without the great community. A small excerpt.

Since the merge of the Monolith code, there have been 99 commits. That's roughly one commit every three hours for the past two weeks. ... As ...

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Habari translations have been going full steam ahead on Launchpad. We currently have translations completed in 5 languages (Danish, German, Japanese, Low German, Traditional Chinese), underway in eight languages (Arabic, Czech, Dutch, French, Hungarian, Russian, Simplified Chinese, Turkish) and a volunteer signed up for Italian and Piemontese (and I've never even heard of that). This is all pretty exciting for me, never having seen a translation happen before, but one of the most gratifying things is that I don't know two thirds of those that are actively doing translations. Great to have you involved! It seems some other members ...

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A minor tremor has been sent through the Habari community. First, some background. While many (in the context of the number of people who have tried out this little alpha project so far) have said that Habari's "Create" page is a joy to behold, the wider administration section has been a work in progress for some time. Several times posts were made to the development list with mock ups and discussion but nothing concrete had been put in place. Back in February, Michael Heilemann announced that he had been working on a new design for Habari's administration pages, Monolith. ...

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I've updated the comment code in Connections. Feel free to leave a comment and let me know if anything seems awry. If it's bug free, it's probably time I released another version. Boy, am I sick of it though. I really need some time to write a new theme.

I work with the team that makes another blogging app, and at least from the standpoint of the quality of the code and application design, Habari is inarguably better [than WordPress]. As Sean notes, though, it's not very mature, so the user experience for a non-technical user would likely be worse. Where you'd make the tradeoff of whether it's worth it depends on where you reside on the continuum from programmer to non-programmer. Some of the technical things I love about Movable Type (which I use) include support for database abstraction, support for multiple blogs, and a well-designed infrastructure for ...

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…Habari is object-oriented. Habari supports database independence. Habari uses an MVC model to separate templates from logic. Habari supports multiple template engines. Habari has a database schema that was designed for efficiency from day 1. Habari has a different kind of community supporting it, one where people who show the ability, willingness, and responsibility to act within the community get the power to do so. This is the iceberg tip.

• Owen Winkler (via)
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