Playing Around with Habari

Habari Project is a relatively new Blogging Platform or Blogging software. The project started more or less two years ago, and the current milestone is at version 0.6.3. Habari claims to be different than other blogging platform, technically and non-technically. For more complete description of Habari, it is wiser to look at their website

Habari is written in PHP5, and uses PHP Data Objects (PDO) to connect to databases. My initial interest in Habari is their PostgreSQL support. I am using PostgreSQL in my server and since most of my applications already use PostgreSQL, I'm a little hesitant to install MySQL just for one blog. With the recent documentation hinting that Movable Type will drop PostgreSQL in the near future, I thought I might as well look at other blogging platform that has PostgreSQL support. And Habari offers this functionality.

Things I like about Habari are:

1. PostgreSQL support.
2. Simple Admin Interface.
3. There are relatively many available plugins and themes.
4. Creating custom plugins (and supposedly themes too, but I have not tried it) are quite easy.

The things I think they can improve on are:

1. More plugins and themes (they are never enough, right?)
2. Support for Categories (Habari only uses tags for each entry)
3. Some kind of WYSIWYG editor when creating an entry.
4. Documentation can use

My first impressions on Habari are mostly good. I do not find lots of bad things about the software other than they can use more contributors to speed things up. Technically, I like what they do. Creating plugin is quite simple, and their documentation on this area is passable to get you started. I've already started to create a simple plugin, and I like how simple it is.

Some Pictures

These are some screenshots to get you idea how Habari Admin page looks like.

Admin dashboard page:

Admin Menu:

New Entry: