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

It seems like an eternity ago that the Habari admin was replaced with Monolith, and all in all, I think it's a good thing. We've had some great additions to the Habari community who have been really kicking it along and ironing out the bugs.

Though I did miss though the incoming links on the dashboard. You might call me vain, but it was nice to be able to see who was linking to my site. Sometimes they were new Habari users who were using one of my plugins or themes, and I could pop over and say hi and thanks. Sometimes they were complaining about one of those same plugins or themes, and I could pop over and say hi and thanks, and hopefully fix the problem.

I've been sick the last few days and needed something braindead easy to do, so I bring you the incoming links module plugin for the new Habari dashboard. No caching or error handling yet, but I might get that finished before you read this post.

As with any plugin that licensing allows me, it's in the Habari extras repository.

I've updated the Publish Quote plugin for Habari, and donated it to the Habari community. It now takes advantage of features added in Habari 0.5 alpha, so that you can set a template for the title as well as the content and specify tags that should be added to your quote entries. Let me know if you have any feature requests. It would also be great to hear from anyone who's using the plugin.

As Habari moves towards its first non-alpha release—the 0.5 beta is due out on 15 May—we can expect more users that aren't developers to try out the software. We need to make sure that the early experiences these users have is as positive as possible. Of course, being beta, there are still going to be issues, as well as the learning curve of using a new piece of software. As the community is pretty developer heavy at the moment, new folks are usually developers too, and if they are having issues they simply jump onto #habari and talk to other ...

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Rick Cockrum writes about wysiwyg editors for Habari, noting that Habari's editor uses raw HTML by default. That might be fine for techie geeks, but is unlikely to go far in the long run. The first option you have is to use an alternative HTML-izible markup, and there are plugins available for Textile and Markdown (actually two for Markdown, here and here, though I really wish they could merge into one version). That may still be too geeky for most. The second alternative is to use one of the recently released WYSIWYG plugins, of which there are three. ...

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If the TinyMCE plugin is a bit heavy for your preferences, Christian Mohn (aka h0bbel) has just checked a NicEdit plugin into the Habari extras repository (download a packaged version from http://habariproject.org/dist/plugins). I did a bit of the coding, so if you have any feature requests, let one or both of us know. Specifically, there are currently no configuration options. If you don't configure you just get the most basic functionality. If you configure and hit save, you get the full panel. Hey, let's call it a work in progress.

Thanks to feedback from Owen Winkler, Matt Read and starjive, I've made some improvements to the TinyMCE plugin for Habari. Most significantly, it now supports Media Silo plugins, such as Flickr and Viddler (in the forthcoming 0.4 release if you're not running out of subversion). Details:

• Support MediaSilo input.
• Allow for plugin to be in directories other than /user/plugins.
• Only send JavaScript if this is the publish page.
• Add resizable option.

I've just started following the Habari feed on Tweet Scan, and it's already been interesting. I came across someone who's trying out Habari, Andy C, asking if there was a plugin for Habari to enable TinyMCE (or FCKEditor). So far, no-one has written a WYSIWYG plugin, only markup plugins for Markdown and Textile, so I whipped one up. Herewith, the TinyMCE plugin for Habari. Feedback appreciated. Telling me you're using it appreciated. [Update: my apologies for getting your name wrong, Andy.]