Valhalla Island

Unbelievably, I will be the first Wordpress blogger not blindly jumping on the all-star Habari bandwagon.

I feel bad writing about Habari when every second post everywhere else is also about Habari. But it’s the ridiculous amount of posts about it that makes me want to write about it… Which makes me a hypocrite. Oh well.

An extremely quick sum up: Matt is an evil dictator that runs a company full of his equally evil minions that together work on a horrible monstrosity called Wordpress. Crippled by Matt’s oppression on them all, nearly every big name Wordpress user and developer moves to Habari, a new, supremely wonderful, blogging platform with a philosophy of goodness so heavenly it’d make Jesus jealous. Now everyone is free, at last, to blog without the torture Wordpress lashed upon them.

What bothers me most is fanboys (and girls) who are blindly dousing their Wordpress installations in kerosene before racing to kiss the feet of the mighty Habari. Ignoring the years of development and huge community around Wordpress for something that doesn’t have a graphical installer, any plugins, any themes or even it’s own website yet.

The Habari Wank blog is great at calling out some stupid things they’ve done. To be fair I’ll mention the Wordpress Wank blog too. Both of them are great reads. I love Habari Wank’s tag line:

“More developers than users.”

I’ve heard many people talking about Wordpress being bloated in reference to Habari. This is something I completely disagree with. Wordpress does have a lot of features but they’re real useful features. I’m the type of person that usually doesn’t use software to it’s full potential but looking around at the moment, I’ve used nearly every feature in Wordpress at least once but most more often.

Something else there’s been a lot of is Matt bashing. “He won’t commit any of our patches or use any of our ideas” they wail. If it’s good code and they’re good ideas, Matt will use them, it’s in his best interest to use them. If someone came up to you and said “Here’s a great free upgrade to the product you’re using” and you agree, you don’t turn it down. I like Matt and I think he’s done very well to handle a project that’s exploded to massive proportions.

While Habari might turn out to be very good, I’m not going to declare my allegiance to it before it’s even made a developer release just because it has big names attached to it.

Funnily enough, all those names attached to Habari are very similar to all those names attached to a certain project that’s been coming soon for a very long time now. Who remembers the hype around that before it became vaporware?