Wow, this is BIG!

There is not yet anything to download or try, it’s an ALPHA release at this point and only suitable for testing, but WOW. Habari is the new blogging tool, which takes advantage of the OOP available in php5. According to Skippy, a former WP dev and now a member of the Habari Blog Tool team, “There exist enough database abstraction libraries that locking oneself into a single database really does seem a poor design decision these days. By using PHP version 5, we gain access to the PHP Data Objects (PDO), which is the PHP-native database independence solution. We currently have MySQL and SQLite working, and are eager to find contributors with PostgreSQL experience. Preliminary conversations suggest that Oracle support wouldn’t be too hard, either, surprisingly enough. Another very real benefit to using PHP5 + PDO is that we gain the use of prepared statements for all database interactions. This drastically reduces the likelihood of a SQL injection attack against your blog. We’re considering using stored procedures, too, as both a means to improve performance as well as to improve database independence.” Translation– faster access, more flexibility, less bloat and more secure. COOL! Read his blogpost for a lot more about the advantages of leveraging the power of php5 for this blogtool. It seems we’ll have a LOT of plugin/extension action on this one in the future, since the OOP makes hooking into the program Ůbersimple.

Though these devs are class act enough not to say it in so many words, the subtext here seems to be that they, like the rest of us, are less than pleased with the (bloated) direction in which WordPress is heading, and the (autocrattic) reason why it’s heading that way, no matter what the community might want. Skippy isn’t the only name on the Habari roster that will look familiar to those who have been following WordPress goings on over the last couple years. Owen Winkler and Chris Davis are also active in the project, as well as Michael Hampton (Bad Behavior inventor), the Nuclear Moose, SpencerP, and a few others I’ve seen around.

So I’m signing up for the User List in about five minutes as an alpha tester. It’ll be interesting to be involved in a project from the ground up, on whatever limited level I can contribute on. I’ll keep you posted.

Technorati Tags: Wordpress Replacement, New Blog Tool, Habari

This entry was posted on Monday, January 15th, 2007 at 9:07 pmunder Web News and . Comment RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.