December 22, 2008 10:00am
Sometime in September 2007, while searching for resources about WordPress's AtomPub implementation, I stumbled upon a post by Chris J. Davis about Habari's implementation. I'd been blogging using WordPress for a short time, around six months, and was interested in contributing, but I found it hard to get my foot in that door (not that I tried terribly hard). This was the first time I'd heard of Habari, and I decided to check it out, with the hope that I might be able to learn some stuff, and maybe lend a hand.
About 17 seconds after joining the #habari IRC channel on Freenode, Andrew da Silva (aka freakerz) greeted me and engaged me in conversation. It's unusual that newbies are greeted on entering a channel, but it happens often on #habari, and it was definitely a hook that drew me in to the community. Before long, I was installing Habari all over the place, porting the theme I was using (Connections, which I'm still using, and which is publically available), digging in with the AtomPub implementation, and generally enjoying the community. And finally, after working out how to match WordPress permalinks in Habari, I made the jump and moved this blog to Habari, one year ago today.
I've always run Habari from the development trunk, where there are no guarantees of stability and always the risk of data loss, yet I haven't had more than the slightest of hiccoughs. When I went live, Habari was on revision 1224, and the stable version was 0.3, which had just been released. Now it's 2957, and we're working on 0.6, so I've updated over more than 1700 revisions, and some major feature additions. It's true that updating does on occasion break a theme or plugin, but that's usually sorted out pretty quickly with the help of the community on IRC.
The Habari Extras repository didn't even exist. Now it holds 149 plugins and 10 themes, dozens of contributors, and has had almost 1500 commits. It holds most of the plugins you might need, but if there is something you'd like, you can add it to the wishlist. The Extras repository has also taught me more about open source software licensing than I'd ever hoped to know, which is to say the only thing I'm sure of is that licensing is hard, and people are passionate about it. Still, this might be an opportunity for Habari, as the ASL, under which Habari is licensed, provides a more solid foundation for premium theme developers than GPL-licensed software such as the dominant player, WordPress. Theme authors, it's time to get your hands dirty with Habari.
There was some nice recognition for Habari, such as being announced as a finalist of the 2008 SourceForge Community Awards, and a positive write up on ReadWriteWeb. Personally, the undoubted highlight of the year was being invited to join the Habari Project Management Committee (aka the Cabal).
I've only scratched the surface of what I'd like to do with and for Habari. It's been an enormous amount of fun so far, and I've learnt a heap; about open source projects and culture, source code management, coding, and community. Thanks to everyone who's been a part of it.
