Secret Mirror

March 12th, 2010

New CMS: Habari

After over eight months of doing absolutely no website work, I'm back in the game with a new design and name. There are still kinks to work out and content I would still like to put up, but I wanted to get this entry out of the way while my design and development experience with Habari is still fresh in my mind.

I was a WordPress user for over a year before I switched to Habari. With the variety of plugins and support available for WordPress, it was very easy to get my blog to feature exactly what I wanted it to in the way that I wanted it to as long as I was willing to play around with the code or harass Google until it gave me answers. Habari is much different in terms of documentation, and simply installing it took me a bit of time because I didn't understand what svn was or if I even had to do it in order to get the installation to work properly.

It turned out that there are special actions that you have to take in order to get Habari to install properly on Surpass, the host provider for this website (special thanks to my good friend Kae for being so kind as to host me on her package and even let me use one of her add-on domains). I had no idea, because the documentation didn't point that out and it took me awhile to come up with the idea that it might be my hosting provider. There was, of course, a link at the bottom of the installation page, but it wasn't as obvious and I feel it could be better explained and pointed out in the documentation.

After I got it installed, though, it has been really nice. The back end is simple, clean and fast. The premade themes for Habari include everything you need to know in order to make a custom, personal theme for Habari. There are some things I haven't figured out how to do yet, but I can tell you that I understood it faster than I understood creating themes for WordPress. That may be because I have previously worked with a CMS, however.

I would certainly recommend Habari to those who are interested in a CMS with very little bloat and have some previous experience with another CMS, but if you're new to the game, it may not be for you. There are a very limited number of themes and plugins, so if you don't like the current ones and aren't interested in developing your own, it's also not for you. For me, installation was the only frustrating part that took awhile to figure out. I would love to see a gallery plugin in the future, as well as a last.fm plugin that shows more than one recently listened track, but I suppose that's motivation to write my own.

Filed in habari