Habari - A Perfect Platform

Habari is the next-generation blogging solution which I’ve been using to power this site for a little over a year. Over that period I’ve been nothing but impressed, not only in the speed that the system has progressed, but the sheer friendliness of the community.

As an example, a few months ago I Twittered about the fact that I missed not being able to add a subtitle to my posts in Habari, less than 10 minutes later I received a reply from one of the main developers with a URL… and there, freshly made just for me was my very own subtitle plugin for Habari!

However, the purpose of this post is not just to convince you to give Habari a go, but to relate my first experience in using Habari for a client’s website. The client in question is a local football club: Farnborough Athletic Football Club.

They had been frankly taken for a ride for several years by a rather unscrupulous individual who had charged the non-profit organisation £700 in two years for a website of few pages apparently made in Microsoft Word. Anyway, I took over the project pro bono and thought it was the ideal time to try using Habari on a site for someone other than myself.

The website is a fairly basic, (mostly static pages), with entries forming the homepage news. Each news article can be ‘tagged’ with a team-name which will then appear on the relevant team’s page, thanks to RN Related Posts plugin by Raman Ng, which show the related posts based on interception of tags.

Each page makes use of the Post Fields plugin, (direct link to .zip) which displays an extra field on the post page to let authors add additional metadata to their posts. I added a ‘picture’ field, an into this I put a .jpg image which I then recall on in the page theme:

<div align="center">
<img src="/resources/<?php echo $post->info->picture; ?>" />
</div>

This lets me display a different picture at the top of the page to represent each team’s kit, or something relevant to the page content.

The only other addition to simply theming the pages, was to add a ‘Documentation’ section to the side bar on the ‘Parents’ page. This is achieved using the built in Conditional Tags function of Habari.

<?php if ($post->slug == 'parents') { ?> 
<p class="heading">Documentation</p>
<ul>
...
</ul>
<?php } ?> 

Finally, so that I don’t have to keep a too watchful eye on the site, I’ve added Chris Meller’s Database Optimizer plugin, (direct link to .zip), and Habari Backup by Scott Merrill, both of which should keep everything hunky-dory. I have also made use of Scott’s Persistence of Memory plugin, so that I don’t get any upset phone-calls from the customer worried their post has been lost after they hit publish and Habari had logged them out.

Habari’s strength as a platform relies on the solid codebase- it makes building whatever you need extremely efficient. In this example the design, (a back of an envelope job), from start to finish took about an afternoon and the best part of the evening to build, theme and launch (not including the waiting for confirmation from the clients).

Much has been written about Monolith, (the admin UI), that Habari sports, so I will just say that I enjoy working with it and the customers have so far been impressed. The way Habari simply gives you a box to write in, a box to add a title, and a nice big button to hit and publish, has been extremely well received, phone conversations have been entirely positive and they seemed happy and confident to use the admin without any guidance from me at all.

As I was finishing this post, Chris J Davis published a piece on pretty much the same thing- that Habari is not blog software, it can be whatever you like. This is the first of a trilogy of Habari posts. The second details where I think Habari is lacking as a platform, and what puts off newcomers. The final post will be about a new theme, which I used as the basis of both the Farnborough Athletic site and my most recently completed site- Travels of A Nobody.com