An update to the stable version of Habari has been released. The Habari 0.6.3 release includes a number of key bug fixes and also provides support for PHP 5.2.10 and 5.3.
Users of Habari 0.6.2 are encouraged to backup and upgrade to 0.6.3.
If you use either of these versions of PHP and have previously been thwarted in your attempts to play with Habari, or you have a dormant 18 month old 0.4 install with a single 'Welcome to Habari' post, why not download 0.6.3 now and see what's changed ?
My role as Chief of the not-so-secret Habari secret police is to evangelise endlessly about Habari to anyone who will listen in an effort to try to encourage them to, at least, try the software.
Aided by my glamorous and able deputy - Detective Michael C Harris of Melbourne (near Australia), we constantly track all mentions of Habari, across the Interweb, in a concerted effort to detect people who have either recently adopted Habari, discarded Habari in a fit of pique or simply continue to sit on the fence.
Interest in Habari has always been there but recently there does seem to have been a slight increase in people actually migrating or adopting Habari full-time for their blogs.
Old Chinese proverb say: 'There are those that talk and there are those that walk.'
People who would simply love to use the stable version of Habari (0.6.2) but are married to Markdown markup need not worry as Paul Griffin Petty has kindly created a 0.6 version of the Markdown Habari plugin while Caius has another handy Markdown related plugin to show the raw source for any page.
Hot off the presses, a quick word about Simon Elvery's excellent comment-ident plugin which lists all known social profiles for commenters. The plugin is now enabled on this blog so simply click on any comment author URL to see it in action.
Finally, for all those people who are still dithering and procrastinating because they fear being locked in to Habari with no exit strategy back from whence they came. Chris Meller produces a useful PHP script to help traitors and non-believers migrate back from Habari to WordPress.
Michael Nacos migrates his technical blog to Habari which is great news as he now has a vested interest in maintaining PostgreSQL support in Habari.
Ali B also resurrects his blog with a shiny new design after a short hiatus and relocating to a primary Habari development hub - Melbourne.
Another Australian with too much time on his hands who has been very busy over the summer break is Simon Elvery who has overhauled his Habari site with a very striking design which is also HTML5 compliant.
Colin Seymour also discovers that further resistance to the lure of Habari is futile, migrates his blog and unveils a sparkling new design to celebrate.
The ability to display images from Picasa in Habari has been a longstanding and much repeated request (well, by me anyway) and Amanda shows us how to accomplish the task with some live examples.
Last weekend saw the Habari Party take place in Columbus and Sean created a special blog to record the occasion while Scott posted a mysterious photo from the mysteriously named 'Surly Girl Saloon'.
There's a lot of chatter about Posterous which is, in simple terms, a blog that accepts posts via email and I've noticed a few people enquiring whether Habari supports such functionality. Of course, the answer is 'Yes'. Mike Lietz recently took the opportunity to dust off and polish the Habari PBEM (Post to Blog by EMail) plugin. I've tested the updated plugin which works great and includes posting images that are attached to the email. So, if you have a Habari blog and have a burning need to be able to post from a phone or email is your preferred posting method, please try out the PBEM plugin.
Finally, on the plugins front, Rick Cockrum produced a Habari importer that allows people to migrate Habari content between database platforms so if you originally used MySQL but would like to experiment with PostgreSQL or SQLite, now's your chance.
Update: Just happened across some video footage of Habari party on ustream. Enjoy.
Last week, I installed the Defensio plugin on this blog to compare how Defensio handles comment spam with the standard functionality available in Habari.
Defensio is a centralised service aimed aimed detecting comment spam on blogs. To use Defensio, you firstly need to register in order to obtain an API key.
Installation of the Habari plugin is very straightforward and there are different versions available depending on your version of Habari.
The author of the Defensio plugin, Matt Read, documented the plugin on the Habari Wiki.
Configuration of Defensio for Habari is very straightforward. You simply generate a Defensio API key and configure the plugin.
Although Defensio is a centralised service, only the validation is performed by Defensio and comments still appear on your blog and can be administered from the comfort of the Habari dashboard.
Defensio also allocates each comment a percentage ('spaminess factor') which is useful to assess how different comments are treated.
Defensio is more similar to Akismet rather than outsourced comment services (like Disqus, IntenseDebate) which also include some comment spam features and moderation is performed from the Disqus administration interface.
The Defensio plugin also includes a dashboard module which provides a quick summary of comments and spam levels.
Obviously, it's early days yet but so far, Defensio has correctly detected 8 comments as spam and 9 valid comments. It will be interesting to see whether Defensio does indeed train itself after some false negatives/positives have been flagged.
That is the question.
People choosing to use Habari have a choice of which version of the software to run:
Decisions, decisions. And all of this so soon after it took you three months to bite the bullet and actually try Habari.
The latest, stable version of Habari is release 0.6.2 which was released in May 2009. If a week is a long time in politics, then four months is an eon in open source, software development.
Habari uses subversion for configuration management and the latest version of the source code in the subversion repository is commonly known as 'trunk', 'svn head' or simply 'head'.
So what are the considerations when electing for 'stable' or 'latest' ?
Personally, I started by using the 'stable' version of Habari but soon got bored of that so quickly installed the subversion software on my Bluehost server and continue to use trunk and tend to sync up every week or so.
What about you ? To SVN or not to SVN ? Please feel free to leave your verdict in the comments.