A White Box

Releasing Habari 0.6.3

2009-10-17T01:21:13+11:00

While efforts are being made to release the next "major" version of Habari, 0.7, in the next month or two. The community felt that there was a need for a minor point release of Habari 0.6 to include a few, but rather important fixes to some minor bugs in the previous version, 0.6.2.

Therefore, Habari 0.6.3 has just been released to replace 0.6.2 which was released earlier this year and to include the following fixes:

Revision 3178 fixes an error thrown in the log when a post with no tag is created.
Revision 3618 fixes the text and styling of the Reset Password button in the login page.
Revision 3693 introduces a workaround to a PHP 5.2.10 and PHP 5.3 bug. This means that you will be able to install Habari on these versions despite of this bug.
Revision 3698 provides the user with the ability to always be able to update his/her own profile even if they don't have the privileges to edit other users profile.
Revision 3707 Fixes the file permissions with which temporary files are created. This in result, fixes some issues with the bundled silo plugins.
Revision 3726 and Revision 3728 add additional security to comments and logs by adding a new permission to control dashboard modules visibility. They also present the addition of a new menu item, My Profile, for logged in users' easy access to their profiles.
Revision 3743 simply adds a missing image to the manual.
Revision 3745 is probably the most important fix in this release. It ensures that the user deleting the post actually has delete privilege.
Revision 3746 makes the undeleted plugin ACL aware.

The latest version of Habari can be always be downloaded from the download page.

A couple of the fixes listed above contribute to a more solid permissions system for multi-users blogs. However, it's worth mentioniong that none of the bugs that have been fixed in this release are major security holes. Habari still marks as one of the most secure CMS's out there.

Mad props goes to the community, as ever, for reporting the issues, implementing the fixes, committing them and/or pushing this release forward. And now that it is out of the way, we can focus more on working on Habari 0.7 to be released soon.

That can never be done, however, without the help of its users. If anything from finding bugs, writing code, and/or editing documentation Wikis is your thing, please step up and help out. I guarantee you that our community will never disappoint.

10 Sexy Looking, Habari Powered Sites

2009-10-16T00:08:58+11:00

Not particularly the top ten, just a random ten that I think look super great. All of these designs are original. Meaning that they're not running any of the available Habari themes out there. After all, the themes deserve an entry of their own.

The list is sorted alphabetically by title. Clicking on the preview image will take you to the respective website.

44forks

Designed and written by Nick Cernis and with his renewable and amusing writing skill, Nick will constantly prove you that etiquette, although often invisible, is still relevant even in our senseless age of the zeros and ones.

Colin Seymour

Colin claims the ownership of more blogs than OpenSolaris experts like himself often do, but if I'm not mistaken, this is happens to be his personal blog. Designed by himself and powered by Habari.

Design Intellection

A small web design studio run by David Yeiser. David also runs the twitter-based web gallery, Good Website.

Future Spark

A brilliant idea. Instead of using the conventional sources of energy, you get to work away those few extra kilos by being a human dynamo, providing power to public events. Designed by the folks at Squareweave.

InDesigning.net

A very rich source of Adobe InDesign tips and advanced techniques in addtion to occational takes on design and developement topics. Written and designed by Thomas Silkjær.

Lvx ex Cælis

The personal blog of Joel Lee, a talented designer and developer from Hualien,Taiwan who donated many themes and plugins to the Habari community.

mindgarden

Digital playground and personal blog of Marc Tobias Kunisch, a web frontend engineer and a web standards advocate. This design has to be one of my top favorites.

Paul Armstrong Designs

Now Paul, he's not a small time designer. I mean developer. I mean designer. Would you make up your mind, Paul? ;-)

Not only the design itself is über sexy, the blog often has valuable information and catchy design tricks.

Sillyness Spelled Wrong Intentionally

The personal blog and portfolio of Chris J. Davis. A developer, designer, author and speaker. Chris has done countless redesigns over the years from a great design to another but this time, he chose a whole different direction in the redesign that turned out to be great nonetheless. The new design uses CSS gradients which is not supported by Firefox yet thus I'd recommend viewing with either Safari or Chrome first.

Sw'as

Pleasant indeed. Sw'as is the blog of Simon Elvery, a Brisbane based web developer, designer and a great photographer. Simon is a valuable Habari contributor and had written a number of great Habari plugins.

Did I miss something?

These were part of the originally designed Habari powered sites that I'm aware of. If you know one that I missed and you think I shouldn't have, please let me know in the comments section below.

Back In The Game

2009-09-15T18:08:39+10:00

No. You're not dreaming. This page is finally 503 no more. I've had delays getting things done on this site before, but I know this one was the longest. But I do have a good reason this time. Well, not really.

The design part of the process did not take much time. Sure, I did some tweaking on more than one occasion, but that was not it. Having recently changed countries, we were preoccupied with the many things that comes with that. If you have done that before you would know what I mean. Stuff like settling in, job hunting, getting things together never gave me a chance to do what was left to do to go live with the redesign, and that is simply just re-writing the parts that needed to be rewritten here. Besides, I'm the laziest person on the planet when it comes to writing.

The new design that you're looking at right now, introduced a few extra pages which the site did not have before. Mainly, the portfolio section. I wanted a place where I can organize the few project that I've done (and hopefully will do) over time and where it is easily accessible to readers. And while it's still rough around the edges, I think I do have a solid ground on which such "catalogue" can evolve.

The Concept

The design itself, codenamed Sky, is intended to focus on optimism and light. The colours, though may not be completely tweaked yet (and I blame my cheap laptop screen), are meant to inspire simplicity and warmth with the abstraction that often reminded me of the sorts of art I used to enjoy as a young boy.

The initial scene and colour combination, codenamed Summer Day (Yep, I do like codenames), is the initial and the only one at the moment.The idea is to to eventually be able to add more combinations and to display them on certain dates, times, or occasions. This should provide a renewable experience to visitors without altering the layout and as a result, affecting its familiarity and navigability.

The Design

Before getting more into the layout details, it's worth mentioning a few points about the scene part of Summer Day. The scene is comprised of layers, each acts as a wrapper to the next one with the last layer wraping the foreground, which is the actual content area. The content of these layers are positioned in a way that when the width of the browser window is changed, these layers scroll at different rates and to different directions to generate an effect similar to the parallax effect. Rather useless, but often intriguing and supposedly fun to play with as it does add some life to the static nature of the layout. In addition to the decorative elements, a few interactive elements, namely the search box and the twitter bird, are added to the background scene to act to serve as a connection between the scene and the content area.

The layout of the content area is different depending on the page currently displayed. The most important one, the home page, is preceded by the commonly displayed top bar, providing navigational links and affirming site identity. An excerpt of few paragraphs from the most recent blog post is then presented to highlight what is the "latest and greatest" addition to the content. After that, a quick welcome is made and a few suggestions of on and off site articles are given. The following section of the content area basically focuses on the history of the site. Providing the visitors with a glimpse of the next recent blog posts on the left, and the most recent projects to the right but in a more visually focusing manner.

The Making

For sites powered by Habari, putting a new redesign together is basically writing a new theme. And not to stress it more than I should, Habari has always been the best platform to create themes for. The degree of flexibility and potential to make great and dynamic themes still dazzles me.

At first, the portfolio part was intended to be integrated within the theme code, but I then decided to have a plugin do that just for the sake of flexibility and layer separation. The plugin is named portfolio and is yet to be cleaned up and released. In addition to a few custom fields that were added to blog pages, everything else is handled by Habari's superb template system.

Credits

The bird is created by rocketgenius and shared under the CC-BY license. Social media icons are from KomodoMedia's Social Network Icon Pack and are shared under the CC-BY-SA license. The font used with cufón is Lane by GemFonts. Finally, the original tree is part of Designous's abstract trees vector pack. Everything else is done from scratch by yours truly.

Acknowledgment

It can never go without thanking some of the guys who provided help, feedback and encouragement througout the development process. Thank you Mike, Owen, Rick, Adam, Michael and Donal. Hopefully, I've not forgotten anyone else. But if I somehow did, thank you!

Feedback?

Several aspects of the new design is still a bit rough around the edges but I would still love to hear about the thoughts you may have of any part of it. Please be generous with your feedback and tell me what you think!

Habari 0.6 Released!

2009-04-06T19:29:50+10:00

Update: Habari 0.6.1 was release few days ago. Read more about it here and download here.

The Habari community has been working hard to fix the bugs and implement the features scheduled for the greatest Habari release yet. At last, we came around releasing Habari 0.6!

Many bugs were squashed and many features were added. But the greatest of them all is the new, mighty ACL system:

With the addition of the extensible ACL system, Habari is now ideal for creating a variety of websites. Whether a single blog or a corporate publishing hub, you have granular control over permissions for every author and visitor to the blog. You can decide who can modify what, and where. To show off the ACL system, we've included a new 'private posts' plugin that lets you limit the visibility of posts to a subset of registered users.

As always, the mad props goes to the Habari community for making all of this possible.

Go get Habari 0.6!

80+ years of Love

2009-03-23T11:49:49+11:00

At around 10 AM yesterday, my grandmother's 80 years old lungs gave up their breath for the last time. She has been suffering for a major lung failure for quite a while now but she's been mainly unconscious for the last 4 days or so until she passed away this morning. Grandma was a kind and loving person and practically helped raising me when I was a toddler. She is survived by my mom, aunt and my 4 uncles.

Good bye Nana. I will miss you.

Up to, what I have been

2009-01-04T04:43:20+11:00

It's been quite a while since I published anything around this site. And while it seems that I am ditching it, the fact is the exact opposite. As you have probably guessed, I've been quite busy, not just at work - which I must say, is always ultra crazy during the holiday season - but I am also working on a new design for this site for the 2009. The design was supposed to be up by the new year's eve, but as usual, I was delayed and distracted. I'm done with the design itself and the static markup/css for the home page, so I'd say that I am about 75% done with it.

Another major thing I was doing is learning Ruby. A very powerful, object-oriented and the sexiest programming language I've came across. By the time I half-finished trying ruby online, I was completely sold. Thanks to Caius's recommendation, I went ahead and bought me Peter Cooper's Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional.

The guy is brilliant, and the book is superb. I admit that I was concerned it would turn out as dull as many of the Apress's 'From Novice To Professional' books but it turned up to be the exact opposite. Reading the book, you can very much tell how much effort was put in the presentation structure and the very well engineered information flow. I'd recommend the book for any one willing to learn Ruby, whether a complete programming rookie or an experienced developer of another language.

Last but certainly not least, I am planning to slightly change the site's focus. While I will still be blogging about Habari, making themes and plugins, I am willing to make the time to write about other subjects. Including my Ruby findings and gotchas as I learn more, some design related topics and much more.

Stay tuned!

Viewzi Site Search Goes Live

2008-12-06T09:19:06+11:00

In a previous post, I wrote a quick review about the Vewzi Site Search service (formally Viewzi for Publishers). Thanks to Chris, I had it running on my site for about two months now, and if you haven't tried it yet, go right ahead an search for something in this site.

In contrast to the dull search results page, VSS gives your site searchers something that is simply beautiful, rich and even entraining. And today, the good folks at Viewzi officially announced the public availability of that nifty service and you can have it on your own blog right now. All you have to do is to register for a free viewzi account (or login if you already have one), head to your profile and click the 'Get Viewzi Site Search' tab. You will get a chance to download the plugin, get your VSS identification number and learn how you can add that coolness to your site.

You can also configure some aspects of the service from within your profile like the title and the URL of your site, and which views you would like to display in your search results and configure them.

Viewzi Site Search service is currently available for Habari and Wordpress users. But plugins for other platforms are said to be coming very soon.

Dual release for Dark Autumn theme

2008-11-23T13:08:20+11:00

Thanks to everyone who tried out Dark Autumn and provided feedback and bug reports, I finally got around to fix the issues and release the tested versions. I say versions because I am actually releasing two versions of Dark Autumn. Because of rapid development that goes on in the Habari land, some changes were made to SVN HEAD (a.k.a. Habari 0.6-alpha) that caused the 0.5 themes not to work with it. Today, I am releasing Dark Autumn 1.0 which is compatible with Habari 0.5, and Dark Autumn 1.1 which is compatible with Habari 0.6-alpha.

Browser Compatibility

Dark Autumn 1.0 and 1.1 has been tested on Firefox 2, Firefox 3, Safari 3 and Google Chrome. It was also briefly tested on IE7 and it seemed to be working. IE7 support is still considered experimental though. Dark Autumn was never tested on IE6 and will never be. Here's why.

Demo

I've updated the demo site and now it has version 1.1 activated. See it in action here.

Dark Autumn 1.0

Version 1.0 is only compatible with Habari 0.5. And since Habari 0.5 does not have the theme configuration feature, you will have to edit the theme's theme.php file to configure it. You do not need to change anything if you'd like to run the theme with the default setup. But if you do want to change stuff, you only need to change the values of the constants that are defined at the beginning of theme.php, right after the class definition.

Download Dark Autumn 1.0

Dark Autumn 1.1

Version 1.1 is only compatible with Habari 0.6-alpha. Refer to the original release post for configuration details.

Download Dark Autumn 1.1

The Way of Viewzi

2008-11-15T04:47:55+11:00

If you think you can't do much about your dull search results page, think again. Thanks to the good folks at Viewzi, that page will no longer be as unusable as it often is.

When Chris started working on it on his blog a while back, I made sure that I am on the list to be of the first who try Viewzi for Publishers on my own blog. He's also been kind enough to help me troubleshoot a couple of issues I had with the VFP Habari plugin yesterday. So, as of today, this site's search is powered by Viewzi awesomeness.

Seeing is believing, they say. Go ahead and try it out. Search for something on this site, browse the results and get back here to continue reading this post :)

What is it?

Viewzi for Publishers (VFP) is a plugin (and a javascript file) that adds Viewzi powered search results 'page' to your blog/site but does not replace the original search functionality of your blog engine. Here is an example of what would a search result for 'Habari' look like. If you were lazy to try it out as of yet, that is :)

What are these views?

The default view is the Blog View. The blog view displays the results of the search within your blog posts and comments. The 2nd view, Blog Photo, displays thumbnails of your Flickr photos related to the search. Finally the brand new view, Blog timeline, displays your search results in a nice, chronologically ordered manner.

I want one too!

Viewzi for Publishers is available as a plugin for Habari and Wordpress. ~~Email Chris Davis~~ Apply to get your search goodness!

No, IE6!

2008-11-02T13:41:13+11:00

I've had it. I really have. While hacking Dark Autumn's CSS to support Internet Explorer 6, I couldn't stop wondering why I was doing it. I am not working on a client's design that bizarrely required IE6 support. Nor am I attempting to make my work comply with something that remotely supports any standard other than Microsoft's ever-changing one. I am just making a free Habari theme that I humbly donate to the public. So why should I bother spending my time begging for that history of a browser to properly display my --allegedly-- standard-complaint CSS? Wouldn't it be better if I spend that time working on another theme that I can too donate to the public?

I am not going to repeat what the many designers and bloggers who abandoned supporting IE6 had to say. Unless you've been under a rock or you don't really follow what goes on in the web design part of the "blogsphere", you probably already heard similar rants from Dan Rubin, Alan & Steve and many others.

Internet Explorer 7 has already been around for quite sometime now. Internet Explorer 8 is on the horizon. So why do some still use IE6? Do you really prefer the loads of open windows over tabs? Do you really like fact that you are the most vulnerable to malware?

If you really are an IE fan, that's not problem. Do exactly what you do with your other software; upgrade. Otherwise, there is Firefox, Safari, Opera and tons of others. Make you pick.

I am fully aware that many companies and corporations are still forcing their employees to use IE6. If for one reason or another your IT staff cannot/will not upgrade you, ask them to install another browser for you. If they are dumb enough to think that IE6 is really the corporate-grade browser, then maybe it's time to write that memo.

Good bye IE6. It's been an unpleasant experience.