A minor tremor has been sent through the Habari community.

First, some background. While many (in the context of the number of people who have tried out this little alpha project so far) have said that Habari's "Create" page is a joy to behold, the wider administration section has been a work in progress for some time. Several times posts were made to the development list with mock ups and discussion but nothing concrete had been put in place.

Back in February, Michael Heilemann announced that he had been working on a new design for Habari's administration pages, Monolith. Some folk had issues with the way this was announced, the biggest being it was a complete design and hadn't been developed with the community. This is personally something I have no issue with. That's the way lots of code gets put into open source projects, so why shouldn't it happen for the design. Once the code is in the repository, the community owns it, and it can be built upon from there.

Less than a week after the announcement, Monolith got its own branch in the Habari repository, and Michael did lots of work on the front end there. Some other people did bits and pieces on it there too, but there wasn't a hell of a lot of activity, around 40 commits in two months, bringing Monolith to be maybe half functional. I'm sure there are reasons why people didn't commit to the branch but I won't go into it here more than point out my own reason. It was on my todo list and I just didn't get around to it.

Everything changed, however, when Owen committed Monolith to Habari's trunk. Suddenly there was a flurry of activity, and our average of a couple of commits a day was completely blown away. In the 24 hours following the inclusion of Monolith, the community went crazy, with 20 tickets being created, 18 tickets closed, and 32 commits.

There has been a minor tremor and, while some things might be slightly out of alignment at the moment, I'm confident that where things settle will be a very exciting place indeed.