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)
The WP documentation and user community is unparalleled and it will take a major catastrophe for it to ever be dethroned as the blogging platform of choice IMHO.
I haven’t looked into Habari too much, but it does look promising, albeit for a very specific target audience…
Habari is not a Google project. Habari uses the Google Code Hosting service, but is in no way affiliated with or sponsored by Google.
Habari is still very much in development. It’s no surprise that people aren’t leaving WordPress — an established solution known to work for many people — for Habari. Habari doesn’t yet offer many of the things a lot of people want.
I’m not sure where you see 58 members on the “cvs team”… A) we use Subversion, not CVS, and B) the Habari project shows 13 committers (4 project owners, and 11 project members).
Yes, we’ve lost a little bit of steam in the last couple of months. Real life has gotten in the way of some of us. I’m sorry to hear that you gave up on Habari when you ran into trouble. A quick post the -user mailing list would likely have found the cause of the problem.
Thanks for the info Scott,
I was under the wrong impression that it was a google project.
the svn group I refer to is here http://groups.google.com/group/habari-svn
I’m not going to nitpick, but the install should have been simple
created a new MySql db, uploaded and chmodded the files and directories correctly and ran the install. It should not have been a difficult exercise to install, but I will say that the developer release is indeed early days and I’ll review it again once I have seen another release, preferrably RC1 or newer.
Scott, the reason why it may seem like I am harbouring a grudge against habari is because I have used many of your plugins in the past only to find out that you have abandoned them.
When you get used to something, it’s difficult to let go, especially seeing as you longer even support them.
Paul: I provided support for all of my plugins during my time with WordPress. I’m no longer working on WordPress, so I no longer feel motivated to provide support for my plugins. Besides, all of my more popular plugins have found new homes, and are under active improvement by new developers. Open source at work!
The habari-svn group you linked is the read-only mailing list of Habari SVN commits. The subscriber count there merely says that 58 people are signed up to receive messages when new changes are committed. The habari-dev mailing list has 255 subscribers, and the habari-users discussion list has 222 subscribers. Again, we have eleven project members with commit privileges, and we’re looking to expand that with some regularity.
I don’t care if you hold a grudge against Habari: I’m not out to convert you or anyone else. I’m working on Habari to scratch my own itches, and to satisfy my own needs. I enjoy it, and I enjoy working with the others involved. If folks want to try out Habari, I’ll do what I can to support them. If no one else ever installs Habari, I’ll still keep working on it.
Your experiences with the installer are unfortunate. Yes, our goal is to provide a smooth, easy installation process. For most people so far, it has been just that. Software can be tricky, though: even the venerable WordPress is known to cause problems during installation.
Again, I’m not here to convert you. I really only commented originally to clear up the confusion about Google’s involvement.
Thanks again for the info Scott, although I should point out that if you cannot convert people, it would be a dead project. Best of luck with the project! I’ll be sure to keep an eye on it.
Seriously though. How on earth can Habari even begin to imagine that they can/will compete with WordPress. In today’s age there are a myriad of choices when it comes to CMS solutions and as blogging platforms go WP and Drupal by far dominate the market IMHO.
The you have internationally aclaimed, award-winning Joomla! to add in the mix with many years of community development behind their belt. How on earth will Habari survive?
I would be interested to know if the server you were installing on met the minimum requirements for Habari.
From what is sounds like you didn’t have some part of PDO installed on your system which is a listed requirement for Habari (we require PHP 5.1 with PDO).
Since we are trying to push current technology to its limits, some of these hiccups are expected. Hopefully your next experience with Habari will be more pleasant!
Oh and I would disagree with your assesment of the health of an open source project. As long as there is one user using the code, and one developer faithfully working on it, then it is alive and well.
Cheers.
right, I tried again
made sure that 5.1 with PDO was running fine, mySql is ok as well and had the same error so I tried another server AGAIN with the same error, so I’ll wait for a newer release or will suggest that Habari changes it’s name to Maskini.
Hey Paul,
may want to paste the full error message. Driver error could be that your PDO driver for MySQL is missing, not that PDO itself is not compiled with your PHP installation.
Hope it helps!
Andrew
Hi Andrew, thanks for the offer, I’ll get around to trying it again at work tomorrow if I can squeeze aside some free time
a lot of television stations in the U.S. and Europe continue to use BetaMax tape systems because of their superiour quality to VHS.
of course, now they’re moving to dv instead … but … well … pfft to VHS.
that is all
You may want to do some major edits to your article. You were operating on false assumptions (Google’s stakes), and bad research (eg ‘cvs team’ for a subversion repo).
Your problems with Habari, be it source-error, or user error, shouldn’t ruin the experience for any one else. You’re entitled to your opinions, sure, but this final remark:
>After what I have learnt about Habari, I don’t think it will last and will sooner than later be abandoned.
is completely unjustified for the reasons listed above. Try out Habari again, and post a follow-up article, please.
and when was the last time I heard ANYthing about habari? probably when I wrote this article a few years ago.
Good luck with it, It will never be as mainstream as say , WordPress or MT