Fun with WordPress - Latest Comments in Why you should give Habari a chance

Re: Why you should give Habari a chance

Owen — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 12:45:12 -0000

It's certainly possible to replicate the look of Habari's admin elsewhere, but the power behind the interface itself is something that you'd miss by doing that.

Specifically, the Habari admin uses methods that allow plugins to alter the interface wholly, not just insert controls in certain places. The result is a cohesion of form and function that even plugins integrate with well.

You can see this at work in how well the media plugins (like the Flickr plugin) integrate into the posting interface. With this underlying "FormUI" feature, plugins can add additional fields and shuffle around existing fields to provide an arrangement of controls that makes the most sense for the task they're presenting to the user.

What you see in the Habari admin is not just a slick design by one of the best designers to influence blogging, but also evidence of Habari's desire to be deceptively simple, yet deeply robust.

Thanks for taking the time to review what Habari has to offer, and I hope you continue to keep up with our work on Habari.

Re: Why you should give Habari a chance

arickmann — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 17:10:15 -0000

Excellent. Thanks Jake.

I reckon it wouldn't be difficult to replace the WordPress admin with a Habari one via a plugin. I won't be doing it though.

Re: Why you should give Habari a chance

Jake — Mon, 18 Aug 2008 15:44:58 -0000

Michael Heilmann, the guy behind Habari's admin interface (who also was behind k2 for wp), posted a couple interesting videos on the process he went through in making it. http://binarybonsai.com/tag/monolith

Re: Why you should give Habari a chance

arickmann — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 15:05:57 -0000

Thanks Arthus, I will certainly not hisitate to point out difficulties where they arise.

I am looking forward to doing some development in a more structured environment; although, I have no intention of ditching WordPress.

Re: Why you should give Habari a chance

Arthus — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 14:33:50 -0000

Thanks for your kind words! Glad to hear you're enjoying your exploration of Habari.

Keeping things simple is deeply ingrained in the culture of Habari: you won't see us adopting any of the bloat which WordPress has come to see. Heck, even pingback functionality isn't core (instead, it's in one of the default plugins).

Fortunately, there is a very powerful plugin architecture and API (http://doc.habariproject.org/api). Unfortunately, the API is still a little undocumented–but I think you'll be pleasently surprised by how clean the code is as well as how powerful. Almost any plugin can be easily built using the API.

As you explore, we'd love specific feedback about what could be improved–particularly regarding documentation,