Owen Winkler has responded to Jacob Santos' post outlining why he wouldn't move to Habari with a point-by-point attempt to change Jacob's mind. Owen was a long-time developer of WordPress and a founding member of the Habari team and so has much experience of both communities. I've only been involved with Habari for a short time, after paddling around the edges of WordPress for a little while, so my perspective is much more as an outsider.

Jacob complains about the complex file and directory structure of Habari. I've hacked the core, worked on themes and plugins, from scratch and extending others, of both WordPress and Habari. I've done a fair bit of coding over the years, but I certainly wouldn't call myself an expert. All that said, and not wanting to denigrate WordPress, there are two things that stand out for me that make Habari very attractive. First, writing themes and plugins, even in this very early stage of development, is a joy. I find things "just work" often. To me, that structure makes that hacking a lot simpler. Second, the community is simply awesome. The energy, inventiveness and support that's been flying around just in the last couple of months has been a joy to behold.

Frankly, I don't care what's happening on other projects. I'm just enjoying working on this one, even in a very minor way.

(I do think Habari could use some more tests. I don't have much experience with testing, but if someone sets up the framework and a couple of examples, I'll certainly add a bunch of tests.)

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 contribution to it. I may not be the best or most experienced coder in the world, but there are skills I can bring, and that seems genuinely valued in the community. I was never a part of the WordPress community, as many of the Habari developers were, and don't have any feelings about how functional that community is, but I hung around a bit. I did the same thing with Habari, but after hanging around for a very short time I was made to feel so welcome that I was almost forced to contribute. In WordPress I was basically ignored. Probably my issue, but hey, that's what happened.

And there are so many fun things that need doing in Habari, I can really get my hands dirty.

[Making OSS UIs work]

Do

1. Get a Benevolent Dictator
2. Make the Program Usable In Its Default State
3. Design Around Tasks
4. Write a Plug-In Architecture
5. User Testing, User Testing, User Testing!!

Do Not

1. Develop Without A Vision
2. Join the Clone Wars
3. Leave the UI Design Up To The End User
4. Make the Interface a Thin Veneer over the Underlying Implementation
5. Treat UI Design as Babysitting Idiots

• Humanized > Weblog: Ten Ways to Make More Humane Open Source Software