WordPress vs Habari
Since Google announced the developer release of its CMS blogging platform Habari (Swahili for ‘what’s in the news?’) I expected there to be a huge exodus of people over to Habari, but funny enough, the reception I expected was not to be. The release started out as being a well publicised event but then seemed to quiet down to an almost standstill.
Ok sure enough, the current release is still only a very alpha developer version (Which, by the way, I tried to install it but could not get past a “driver error” which seemed to break the install. A quick rm -rf habari/ sorted that problem out quick enough.) but I was still honestly expecting more. And so far, nothing.
The cvs team after a number of months only consists of a whopping 58 members. hmmm… updates to cvs releases have been less than 1 a month, if that.
Even The Habari project blog has 1 post on it, made back in February.
I don’t get it? Why would Google try and launch something like this and not support it, financially or through aggressive marketing. And one of Habari’s selling points is that it “implements the full suite of the Atom Publishing Protocol“. Excuse me, but aren’t more and more people moving away from Atom?
This is exactly the same as pumping effort and money into BetaMax 10 years after VHS dominated the market. (For the younger readers of this blog, BetaMax was a large video cassette format in the days before CD’s, DVD’s, Laserdiscs or MPeg4 when Michael Jackson was still black)
One of the most dissapointing things I came across was the knowledge that some WordPress plugin developers were moving away from WP and over to Habari.
After what I have learnt about Habari, I don’t think it will last and will sooner than later be abandoned.
I am firmly in the belief that WordPress is here to stay as one of the most popular platforms.
(This is NOT a paid for post)
WordPress 2.2 out now
WordPress 2.2 “Getz” has been released and is available for download from wordpress.org.
This release promises a great many bug fixes (over 200 or so they claim) as well as some new features, most notably Widget Intergration.
Previously widgets were available as a plugin but is now intergrated right into the core.
While this current theme I am using is not widget friendly, it soon will be as there are far too many cool goodies that are available as widgets to ignore them.