echo "hey, it works" > /dev/null

Thanks to concise advice from Owen Winkler (aka ringmaster), my test Habari install now has the same URLs as my existing WordPress blog. That means that when I move, all my links will still work. It would have been a pain to redo all my internal links, but those three sites out there in the wild web that link to me are really valuable ...

For reference (lines wrapped for clarity):INSERT INTO habari__rewrite_rules
(name, parse_regex, build_str, handler, action,
priority, is_active, rule_class, description)
VALUES ('display_entry',
'%(?P<year>\\d{4})/
(?P<mon0>\\d{2})/
(?P<mday0>\\d{2})/
(?P<slug>[^/]+)[/]{0,1}$%i',
'{$year}/{$mon0}/{$mday0}/{$slug}',
'UserThemeHandler', 'display_post', '8', '1', '0', '');

[Update: Don't copy and past the query above, you'll get spaces in your regex that break it. Use this text version instead. Also, make sure you change the table name to the correct prefix, habari__ is the default and most likely.]

Michael Bishop (aka miklb) over at Blogging Meta has released a new version of the Mzingi theme for Habari. I used Mzingi as a reference when I was porting the WordPress Connections theme to Habari, trying to figure out how Habari themes work. It's a really nice theme. Kudos to Michael for all his great work with Habari.

I've just released a port of the WordPress Connections theme by Patricia Müller for Habari. At the moment it's an extremely basic and direct port. There is no support for plugins, no blogroll and no archives. If anyone uses it and has any requests, let me know. In fact, if anyone uses it, feel free to let me know. This is my first Habari theme, so it's probably really crappy. I don't mind if you tell me it's crappy if you do it in a nice way or tell me how to fix it. I did derive some of ...

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Chris has announced the release of Habari 0.3. For more information, see the notice on the Habari project site. I haven't had much to do with the project yet, but this is the first open source project release that I've seen from anywhere near the inside (on the dev list, and IRC), and it's been interesting. The Habari community is young and there are lots of enthusiastic people involved, some coders, some not. There are as many important discussions about how processes should work as there are about the code, which is great. When I have the time to spend ...

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Donal asks me, "Why will [Habari] be better than WordPress?" Habari may or may not be better than WordPress, but I'm not sure that's really the right question to ask in my case. While Habari is a lot younger than WordPress, it's been developed from the start with a solid vision by people with a lot of experience with blogging software. That's all good, but it's still not why I became involved. Okay, maybe obsessed, but that's who I am. No, it's because Habari has an open, welcoming and vibrant community, and I feel like I can make a real ...

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The Habari developers have done a great job getting AtomPub implemented early on. The AtomPub implementation is now error free, according to the APE, but there are still warnings and it is still partially incomplete. As I see things, these are the outstanding issues that I know about, in no particular order. Each of these should probably be entered as a separate issue in the tracker. As I'm not super familiar with the spec, I've probably missed bits that Habari doesn't support. If any of this is wrong, or it's incomplete, or you think my solution is off, please ...

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I previously dismissed PHP's alternative syntax for control structures, but after spending some time working on themes for WordPress and Habari, I've come to realise that it's actually very useful from a readability point of view. The point is that if you have a mix of code and HTML, as themes do, then it can be very difficult to work out what control structure that lone dangling close brace is actually closing. By spelling it out with a endif, endwhile or endforeach the code is made just a little bit clearer. So, for templating, okay, I'll accept it. ...

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I've been playing around with Habari, and so far I've tested the install on three different machines. One of Habari's requirements is Apache's mod_rewrite, which allows URLs from a client to be rewritten on the server. This means that a browser can request a pretty URL, such as http://www.example.com/habari/really-interesting-post and it will be redirected on the server to a script that returns the post with the slug really-interesting-post. Mark Jaquith has written a good article about this in relation to WordPress. When mod_rewrite isn't working, Habari will give you the following error message during installation (Habari ...

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I hung out in #habari yesterday, and I have to say it was a lot of fun. Everyone was extremely welcoming. I wasn't even allowed to lurk, as freakerz said 'hi' to the stranger, which was great. I'm not sure I would have contributed to the discussion if not. Habari will be a better piece of software because of this attitude.