Habari—well, fine no comments
Habari is a blogging platform by a group of people who contributed to WordPress in the past. Matt, the WordPress founder, describe it as “Drupal meets Serendipity.” Yesterday, they just released Habari 0.5 which includes several improvements such as two new default themes, new admin interface (named Monolith) and supports for UTF-8.
Personally, I’ve never heard of Habari just until recently, in fact, I’ve learn about it just yesterday and I’m urge to try it out.
For a little disclaimer, I am no usability expert nor a design guru of any kind. Just a random person trying out blogging platform for fun. And English isn’t my mother tongue.
I have been using quite a few blogging platform for the past few years, from MovableType, Typo, Drupal and then WordPress.
My experience with MovableType is quite pleasant, since it’s the only blogging platform I’ve used more than one year, but their interface (version 3) is very confusing, you can lost track of where you’re going and where you come from very easily. For Typo, I don’t remembered very much about it, other than how painful it is to setup Ruby on Rails.
I love at how flexible Drupal is, but dislike their interface, it’s confusing. Most of its defaults make it a very complicate to make a good looking theme (and no, I don’t consider Tapestry a “good-looking”). But things will get better, since Dries already state that he won’t release Drupal 7 unless 90% of usability issues has been fixed.
Wordpress, on the other hand, I really like how it lets you write contents on it and not worry about the other parts of the system, but the first time I used WordPress, it’s the infamous 2.1 so I don’t trust WordPress on anything about security.
Let’s look at Habari. The first time you run Habari, you’ll either see an error message saying your .htaccess is not writable or a nice looking installation screen.
The installation is very fast, however, their use of “black borders” to indicate “this section is completed” doesn’t work really well, you won’t be able to notice what it means until you’ve filled out at least one section. It looked like a decoration more than something actually related to the state of installation.
After you’ve finished the installation, you’ll be greet with a default “Mzingi” theme which I personally don’t like, it looked lousy and didn’t look very clean as it intended to. Also, they didn’t prevent re-sending installation POST data by redirecting to self, which I consider this a bad thing.
The first time you’ve logged in as admin, you’ll be greeted by the empty dashboard—since there’s no dashboard modules enabled. Trying to add new dashboard item from the empty list will result in “Added module undefined.” Once you’ve enabled the module in Plugins, there’ll be an information about latest entries, comments and a log activity.
Due to errors, I’ve also been greeted by two message boxes, one at the bottom and one as an overlay on the top left, these two messages are the same but the overlay will fade out after some time. I’ve been trying to fix the permission problem on caching directory and by the time I logged in to the server, the message fades out forcing me to expand the message log to fix some stuff. This is bad, especially for warning (it doesn’t even looked like a warning).
I never liked the idea of drop-down to begin with. It adds extra action just to select something, in this case, you’ll need to hover the mouse above the drop-down. Habari designed this drop-down with keyboard users in mind by adding navigation key, however, since I’m a Vimperator user, this drop-down makes it impossible to navigate using keyboard alone.
Next is the Publish Entry page, personally, I think it’s overly simple and confusing. Tell me why there are two places for tags and why isn’t the settings, which controls state of the post, isn’t expande by default? And what’s wrong with the usual title? Using placeholder text everywhere isn’t a really good idea. Resizable textbox is a good thing, though.
I often confuse between Page and Entry. The four published entries on this blog are first published as a page. Partly to blame is myself, and another part to blame is the platform itself. Looking the same is a good thing, but for two things that works differently to look the same is not a good thing. There should be distinction between the two.
The Manage Posts looks good, but I as I’ve said before, I never like the drop-down menu, especially for actions, I’m not going to like the “Edit” thing on the right. I don’t understand what’s the point of draggable black bar on the top, I suspect it’s something related to search but since there’s only one entry, this thing is just another confusion.
There’re still several things I can write about how I dislike the admin interface of Habari. Lack of color in place and inefficient use of black and gray makes everything looks really dull. Taking a good part from an existing platform, especially WordPress who’s ahead of others, won’t going to hurt. No need to reinvent the wheel.
Habari is an interesting blogging platform, and I think it has potential. However, no matter how good the code they’re producing, users only see things at its surface. What Habari is currently lacking is the appeal. Things might get better when they reach 1.0 but for now, let’s see where they’re going.