Is Habari any better than WordPress?

April 23, 2008 7:15 PM

Blog systemFilter: Is Habari any better than WordPress?

I'm currently running a WordPress website, and am contemplating converting to Habari. I've been hearing very good things about Habari, are there any benefits to it?

posted by devlin to technology (5 comments total)

Not For Ambition or Bread is a blog I read frequently, that is running on Habari. Sean is a volunteer member of the Habari Project Management Committee, and posts about his work with the Habari community. I think you'll get something from reading through a few of his posts.
posted by paulsc at 1:26 AM on April 24

I am the Sean that paulsc mentions above. (Thanks!) And as he said, I am one of the members of the Project Manangement Committee for Habari. At this point Habari is still a very new application. It's still at an alpha stage of development, so if you want a system that "just works" it may not be ready yet. Also, as young as it is, the range of themes and plugins available is not as wide as for other, more mature apps. However if you enjoy tinkering with your software, Habari may be interesting to you.

At the risk of sounding like a marketing hack, there are two major advantages to Habari has focused on. The first is that, being built from the ground up, Habari uses PHP5 and PDO to give it very clean object oriented code, as well as database independence. Currently it supports MySQL and SQLite. The second (and more significant to me as a non-coder) is the Community behind the project. This is especially significant at this stage, when most of the people involved are also interested in contributing to the project. Habari uses the Apache meritocracy model to reward people who contribute consistantly with more authority. We have two active mailing lists one for user issues and one for development as well as a very active IRC channel on freenode. We think it is important that decisions that affect the community as a whole happen entirely in the public eye. We also tend to be very passionate about Habari. Many of the developers subscribe to Habari specific feeds from Google, Twitter, Technorati, etc. and make an effort to respond to questions and comments about Habari wherever they may find them. (Frequently with more clarity than I manage to pull off.)

From a use stand point, it's a blogging app. It's capable of extension through plugins, but the focus of the project is to make it simple to post your blog. The interface is very clean, and we have some cool things like the Media Silos that allow you to access your media stored elsewhere (like flickr or viddler) directly from your composition screen.

I hope this answers the question without being too much like advertising. Like I said, we're passionate about our project.
posted by Morydd at 5:44 AM on April 24

It depends on what's making you consider switching. I remember the day, long long ago, when I switched from MovableType to WordPress because WP didn't download twenty images every time I did something on the admin pages.

I'm working on switching now from WP to Habari because I know a couple of the developers and it's already just about functional enough for my needs. If there's something I need, that's where the community kicks in - I can log a ticket, write a tweet, or jump in the IRC channel and get things fixed or written.

So, again, it comes down to what you want or need. The core functionality to run a site (or multiple ones, even) is there, but some of the more popular nice-to-haves and plugins aren't--yet.

It's definitely worth taking a look. And moreover, to keep watching.
posted by codger at 9:42 AM on April 24

Give up WordPress??? For something that's in alpha????? That's crazy talk.
posted by exhilaration at 2:07 PM on April 24

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. 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 things like templating -- Habari does all of those things very well for a young application as well.
posted by anildash at 9:00 PM on April 24