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News is surfacing all over the WordPress community and beyond of a fledgling, open-source based weblog/CMS project named Habari. Seemingly started by a small group well-known within the WordPress community it aims to be in direct competition and has been started out of certain frustrations with its elder and dominantly established platform.
I can both understand and sympathise with those frustrations. WordPress is a great piece of software and will be very hard to knock from its perch but it is going through the stage that all innovative software and indeed small companies go through that experience huge and unplanned for growth with the addition, as I have discussed before, of a certain arrogance at parent company Automattic. Avoiding the pitfalls that WordPress is experiencing is no easy task and decisions made by the Habari team now will inevitably come back to haunt them in the future.
Having myself been involved with both start-up companies and a clean slate within which to engineer new software applications, I know that those first few weeks and months are an exciting time, the ideas and the adrenaline flowing, exhausted fingers rattling the keyboard full of desire to get it all coded before the dream starts to evaporate. It is the most productive time in any software project but it is also the most dangerous.
The key to it of course is planning, which also, in my experience, tends to be the part that programmers in particular tend to disdain as it immediately starts to shackle their imagination. But if a project like Habari is to achieve success and, more importantly, sustained success, time spent at the beginning planning for the future is an imperative - before the project has actual users to worry about and before the project moves from the bedrooms and studies of two or three key people into the public domain and the inevitable conference and board room.
A week or so spent watching the WordPress support forum and subscribing to the various mailing lists is almost a lesson in futility. The same questions get repeated over and over again on the forums and the same suggestions get raised over and over again on the mailing lists. Leaving aside the sometimes arrogant dismissal of outsiders by the Automattic team, much of the problem with WordPress is the very fact that it is a juggernaut. Even a small change request that might be seen as a great benefit to the many is hard to accommodate because of the havoc it can wreak on the user-base. But often you can’t help thinking that many of those same requests actually make so much sense they should have been in the core product since the beginning.
The suspicion, of course, is that WordPress was started in the same way that so many projects are, by a couple of people with a vision and an itch to get it coded, never expecting that it would be the huge success that it has become. And seriously never realising the pressures that thousands of users can bring to bare when something goes wrong or when necessary changes can’t be made because of initial design limitations. In short, there was no plan for success.
I both applaud and welcome the Habari project. I will be one of the first to download an early cut when it becomes available and I look forward to watching it’s progress over the coming months. I suspect that it will be a bigger undertaking than anyone on the team yet anticipates but I wish them every success. The goals they have set themselves are admirable and I hope they achieve them. And while I understand that it’s both hard and a nuisance at this stage of the game, I implore the team to think long and hard about the future. A short-cut or compromise taken at the beginning for expediency more often than not turns into the nightmare that cannot be undone two years down the road.
For what it’s worth, here are a few of my main gripes with the WordPress world, leaving aside any actual software and usability issues. It is my contention that these points also need to be taken on board by any competitor:
- Installation: WordPress boasts a simple and quick install and, if you know what you are doing, it is. The reality is that most people don’t know what they are doing and a large number of them screw it up and then clutter the support forum. A proper, simple and guided installation process is a must.
- Upgrades: Again the WordPress method of upgrading is as bizarre as the lack of cohesive instructions on how to do it. With every release or even small update the recommended approach is to wipe out all files and upload a completely new set. This worries a lot of users and many, once again, get it wrong or worse, ignore security fixes and don’t upgrade at all. The lack of hand-holding through this difficult process - for most users - is a severe lack of sensitivity to the fact that the vast majority of users don’t even know what ftp is. Automatic or semi-automatic upgrades must be a goal from the early stages.
- Upgrade Details: This is a big and contentious issue. Trying to find out exactly what has been changed with any update, even big major releases, is like trying to pry information out of government agencies. Ask, and they shout ‘look at Trac’ which to the vast majority of users is, of course, gobbledygook! Transparency and information is a must to foster a good development community - plus it removes the unwanted surprises from users.
- Documentation: The WordPress Codex is large and expanding all the time and I applaud the efforts of those who contribute to it. The problem is that it’s an unqualified mess. It sprawls uncontrolled with no sense of structure or cohesion and the search facility is pretty worthless. The codex should be the first stop for problem solving but I suspect many people look, don’t find it easily and give up or go to the forum - usually to ask the same questions that come up daily! Easy to navigate, simply written but extensive documentation is an absolute must. Good documentation will keep the users questions at bay. And decent and comprehensive development documentation will go a long way to making a fledgling system a success.
- Support Forum: The WordPress forum does it’s job but because of the insistence on using lightweight sister product bbPress it leaves a lot to be desired - mainly in the search arena. Trying to find previous answers is a depressing ordeal yet the first thing the forum volunteers yell is ’search, search, search’. We would if it worked. So the tip here is use decent software that is up to the job.
- Themes and Plugins: Of course being able to build third party themes and to extend the base system through plugins are major strengths and I doubt any competitor would get out of the starting gate without offering this level of functionality. The problem is that WordPress takes no responsibility for the safety, quality and reliability of either. Whilst I understand that would be an awesome task to undertake, they do appear to endorse certain plugins by allowing them to be listed on the Codex. But anyone can add a plugin to the Codex - even a harmful, rogue one. I have always believed that WordPress should ‘own’ the central repository of plugins and themes and allow the user-base to endorse them.
Of course, to suggest that the Habari team have all these things in place from day one is a pipe dream. But I do implore the team to careful consideration early on and plan for the infrastructure they will need down the road because playing catch-up later rarely seems to work.
And then, of course, there is the raising of the cash to pay for it all…
For more information relating to this news you can visit key team members: Chris J.Davis, Khaled Abou Alfa, and Michael Heilemann at their respective homes.
Hey Andy, excellent post. This is the sort of feedback that the Habari team I think will most definitely be taking into consideration because it aims to help with experience. Believe it or not, today was spent trying to sort out the installer, which I think you’ll find to be something very unique in the way it handles everything. Hopefully that will mean no support questions regarding the installation process :). I know tall order but we’ve got high aims.
An also I think you’ll be glad to know that the design is trying to make sure you don’t have to click several times to get to places (ie think drop down sub-menu).
The menu didn’t go unnoticed - and of course I heartily approve. I almost feel like volunteering actually but I’m not sure what I could actually do to help!
Andy, if you didn’t add a single line of code, your insights alone are a great thing for all of us. We need people that can express themselves as well as you have in the post above.
Drop by the irc channel (#habari on irc.freenode.net) and talk to the guys. There’s loads to be done as you know, and truly we are trying to make the best publishing software with the view to always keep learning, to always innovate to never stop questioning.
What could you do? This post is a great start. I am very thankful to people like you who take the time to express themselves.
There are literally hundreds of things that need to be done, more than enough to keep an army of mad monkey robots busy, let alone the small team we currently have.
I encourage you to use the issue tracker to make feature requests and observations, so we can have them on record.
Thanks again for the great article.
[...] Thanks to these sites, who talked about Habari early on: h0bbel Blogging Pro Yellow Swordfish Photomatt wank Solo Technology [...]
Frankly, from what I’ve seen so far, I’m kind of skeptical.
Not because of any flaw in the software, since I’ve only seen the front end and have no idea how it’s put together; not because of the people involved, ’cause I barely know any of them by face or deed and couldn’t criticise them for what I do know; really, my concern is more one of marketing.
To put it simply, ‘Habari’ is a very silly name. ‘WordPress’, on the other hand, is a very good name. It’s descriptive, it sounds powerful and enabling, and it’s in English, which is still a majority language in terms of understanding - unlike Swahili, which is conversely commonly used in sitcoms as an example of one of those languages that nobody knows.
In my experience, non-English names scare and/or confuse a lot of people, not to mention make it hard for people to discover the software in the first place. If I’m some newbie who’s looking for weblog software ‘WordPress’ or ‘Movable Type’ sound a lot more like the kind of thing I want than something like ‘Habari’. That could mean anything! It could be an image manipulation tool, a game programming API, a database, a foodstuff or some weird genre of fetish porn I’ve never heard of. Giving things names that don’t mean anything - or mean something kitschy in a different language - is very geek chic and all, but it turns normal people off instantly. Hell, I kind of suspect that half of MySQL’s dominance over PostgreSQL is down to people thinking ‘PostrgeSQL’ sounds scary. And not knowing how to pronounce it.
Hey, maybe that’s what they’re trying to do, I don’t know. Maybe ‘Habari’ is just a development name and they intend to change it to something more germane later, but I’d worry that such names tend to stick and you lose a lot of your good press when you change your identity…
[...] We've been working on Habari since October, 2006. I'm tickled that many of the suggestions on "What the new kid on the block needs to get right" had been discussed long before we ever announced the project. With the influx of interest and enthusiasm, there's been a lot of attention on the installation process. Hopefully we can dedicate as much energy to the upgrade process as well. [...]
Not a bad comment. And I’d accept the contention that an English name becomes almost universal. I rather think they plan to stick with the name though - so maybe it wil just be accetable in non-English speaking lands…
Because Ubuntu really didn’t work out for them? It’s obviously an important issue, but it’s about what’s behind the name and how it’s portrayed and used. It’ll grow on you.
I totally agree with you on the points that wordpress misses. I really love wordpress, but was surprised with it’s downfalls right away, these seem like things they should have gotten right. My #1 is the featured themes and plugins. Some of those themes are horribly coded (as you have helped me with) and aren’t compliant. I really feel for the people who don’t have anyone to help them with their issues. I honestly don’t think I would have known how to get through a update or many of the settings without your advice. I don’t know how other people find the answers to get it all right. I hope someone with wp, or habari sees these things and realizes how important they are.
Ubuntu is a bit of a disingenuous - or perhaps just naïve - example, though. ‘Linux’ also doesn’t mean anything inherently, although I guess the shape of the word might clue in Unix geeks. What’s the competition? ‘Debian’? ‘Gentoo’? ‘Red Hat’? Which of those says “stable and secure unix-like open-source operating system” less than ‘Ubuntu’?
(As it goes, I know at least one guy who refuses to even try Ubuntu because he thinks it’s got trendy due to people wanting to “demonstrate solidarity with Africa” and doesn’t want people to jump to conclusions over his choice of OS…)
More to the point, though, for all the Slashdot crowd talk about 2005, no, 2006, no wait, 2007 being the year of the Linux Desktop, Linux is still used mostly by geeks and technical people, who are far more accepting of meaningless or oblique names than everyone else. It’s expected, almost, in the world of OSS, with it’s high-profile banner-bearers with names like ‘Apache’ and silly recursive acronyms. I’m pretty sure that weblog software, on the other hand, is far more commonly looked for and set up by less-geeky and likely less-technical people than those who are after Linux distros.
Now, sure, ‘weird’ names can become perfectly acceptable to the man on the street - everyone knows ‘Google’, which wasn’t a word before 1999 or so, and ‘Wiki’ apparently made the jump from Hawaiian to commonplace English usage, so it’s not impossible - it’s just really really hard. I’m pretty sure ‘wiki’ in particular entered public understanding more as a result of media coverage of Wikipedia than because people were looking for collaborative documentation systems and actually looked for functionality rather than a likely-sounding name.
Good luck to you guys - I share Andy’s enthusiasm for the project, both ’cause it’s always good to have more choices and because I’m only just starting to look at WordPress and already finding stuff which makes it not totally ideal for me, and I certainly look forward to seeing releases. I’m just wary - I’m moving to WordPress from a platform I wrote myself specifically because it’s popular and thus more likely to continue to be supported and developed, and likely to attract helpful plugin authors to do work I’d rather not spend time on. I’m lazy, you see. I worry that without the kind of popularity that projects like WordPress or Firefox enjoy, things like Habari might never get the community support they quite probably deserve.
Also, I keep spelling it wrong ’cause I don’t speak Swahili.
[...] The thing about Habari is that is starts from scratch, and today. That means it doesn’t have to worry about a lot of existing legacy code and thus, downward compatibility. It is also being designed from the grounds up, using the latest available technology. Heck, it’s full OOP! It abstracts database access! You can plug in different theme engines (and, of course, there are plugins). In short, it could easily be the greatest thing since pressed words. [...]
Just passing through on plugin business and thought i’d check this post out. Looking at the new WP release, it seems like the kids at Automattic listened to your advice (even if they didn’t hear it) in a lot of ways, most of your points have been adressed on some level.
Did you end up trying Habari yet?
@Jeremy
I don’t really agree that WP has gone anywhere near addressing these issues to be honest. In particular, the best information on what is going on still seems to come from independent sources, documentation is still a haystack, installs and upgrades remain the same… Etc.
Trawling the source code is still the recommended way of catching changes - or reading and deciphering the incomplete responses on Trac.
Habari - still looks promising but I am waiting for the promised 0.3 release to try it again.
I like ‘Habari’ as the name.
@Jake: What about Joomla?