I feel it might be unfair to announce that I’m no longer using Habari without explaining why. There are several reasons, and I actually didn’t make the move away from Habari with the intent of solving them, either. It wasn’t a matter of ditching Habari for something better, but something different altogether.
Habari is a slick little blogging platform that has a lot of promise. I especially like their emphasis on the quality of Habari’s internals, which I think means it will do very well over the long term.
I am, however, confused by the community of developers surrounding the project. That is, unlike WordPress where people are churning out high quality themes and plugins that provide excellent new functionality, I see a few long-neglected, poorly supported extensions, and a handful of so-so themes.
Perhaps such a healthy community does exist and the project leaders just have a hard time of surfacing their work on the web. I don’t know. But I only found a few plugins that provided functionality I needed, one of them being the Twitter notifier that never, ever stopped telling me there was a newer release available (a notice prominently displayed on the admin dashboard) despite already being that installed release. And this was one of the plugins in the official repository.
Likewise, and again it must be compared against WordPress, which is from a consumer’s perspective the best-of-breed, Habari’s documentation is a tragic shambles. I’m sure in part that’s because this is a volunteer-driven project, but just covering the expected-working scenarios in a wiki doesn’t cover it. Thoughtful, cross-referenced, and well-indexed documentation that covers known problems, common mistakes, and what to do when things go wrong cannot remain embedded in your mailing list history or irc logs.
I think the future of Habari depends heavily on the maintainers’ ability to foster a community of user-contributors around the platform, and to do that you must have good documentation. Without those contributions, it’s not a platform worth switching to or starting with, despite its other merits.
What merits are those? I feel the project leaders have made some very smart, well-reasoned decisions regarding internals and core features (see the FAQ and coding standards for examples). Part of my initial interest in using Habari came from the possibility of contributing to the project, but I’ve found that as most of my day job time is spent on PHP, my after-hours time needs to be more diversified (as you can see elsewhere on this blog). It still looks like a very sharp project for someone hoping to get some FOSS experience to look into. And I may eventually come back to that.
So, what I can say in favor of Habari is that it appears to be a solid development effort, and if I were to summarize my complaints about it, I’d have to say that the secondary development efforts, by the add-on community, are lacking. I’ll leave it at that.