I am happy to announce the 0.5 release of Habari Mobile Admin. This plugin creates an admin experience targeted at iPhone and Android mobile users.

The plugin isn't done by any means, but it is stable enough to get it out there for feedback. Comment moderation isn't enabled yet, but that is coming in the first update sometime later this week. Everything else should be there and ready for you though.

Head on over to the project page for the skinny, a slideshow and the download link.

Hot off the presses, Frequent Reference for WordPress. Check the project page.

I don't know about you, but I find myself referencing the same companies and sites over and over again .

The idea

Quickly it becomes tiring to add the bits of HTML to each reference to make them into links. Usually I just get lazy and leave them hyperlinkless. This cannot continue!

To that end I have written a new plugin for Habari Project called "Frequent Reference" that allows you to make a list of all the companies/sites that you find yourself referencing again and again in your posts, and have them automagically hyperlinkified upon output to the browser.

How it works

Effectively you will write the HTML for your references one more time, and after that anytime you reference the site/company the plugin will take care of making it a link for you.

Once you activate the plugin, you will need to configure it via its customize panel:

As you can see you simply type in the word you will reference followed by the URL. You separate these with a comma. That's really all there is to it.

By way of example, the link to Habari in the above paragraph was created by the plugin. I simply wrote the word Habari. You will also notice that when I reference Habari in this paragraph, it isn't linked up. The plugin links up the first occurrence of the word, not all of them

There are improvements that can be made I am sure, but I think that for now it is ready for some more use out in the wild. I will eventually have this hosted in the extras repo, but until then you can grab it right here.

Yes, thats right there is a new point release in the 0.6 series. This release fixes a whole slew of bugs and refines the user experience a bit. This is an important step in the journey to 0.7.

It is bitter sweet to see this release, since I haven't been able to really be a part of things in Habari for the last 6 months or so due to work and personal issues. Hopefully that will change soon. I miss getting in there and making teh hotness.

Anywhoo, go and get it while its hot!

So recently I made the offhand tweet that Habari will be the new Rails, and I was only partially joking.

This sparked a few tweets from friends of mine, ranging from the usual supportive, uplifting words of Caius, to the disbelief of my good friend Kevin, and finally ending with the always sage words of the good doctor.

It was at this point that I realized people don't get what Habari really is... even some of us who founded the thing.

What Habari Is

Habari is a stunningly beautiful piece of code. From its architecture to its admin UI Habari is just beautiful to look at. It offers unparalleled flexibility and forward thinking. Writing plugins and themes for it is a joy, and we are just getting started in those areas.

In short, Habari is one of the best pieces of software out there to build your blog with.

What Habari isn't

You sitting down? Good. Habari is not and I repeat not blog software.

Can you build and publish a blog with it? Absolutely, but it is not blog software. Labeling it as such is a disservice to the software as well as to the core vision that those of us who founded it had. Habari is no one thing, and that is why it is so exciting to work with.

One of the core ideas behind the creation of Habari was that we can't anticipate what content websites will be pushing in 10 years, let alone 10 months so don't tie the software, and ultimately your users, to any one thing.

Habari is content agnostic, meaning it just really doesn't care what you create and manage with it. You register a new content type, tell Habari how to act with it and get on with your life.

I don't think the four of us who sat around a table at Bucca really understood what we were hoping to create, we just knew we wanted something different. And boy did we get what we wanted.

Habari has all the makings of a top shelf rapid development framework. The ACL system that landed in 0.6 gives you complete control over the actions of those who create accounts on your site. The internal URL parser and plugin architecture give you so much power that it really can become awe inspiring as you write a couple of methods and find you have a workable web app.

These reasons and a host of others are why I say that Habari can be the next Rails. I am hoping that Tim and Tracker (site coming soon) will help to prove the case for Habari as an application framework.

Both of them are built on Habari with no core code modifications, just some plugins, custom classes and theme work.

And that my friends, is pretty amazing.

Please bear with the slowdown around these parts. I am running the bleeding edge of Habari, which has landed some pretty great new functionality.

Unfortunately it looks like we introduced some code that has impacted the lightning quick reflexes Habari is known for. We are working on addressing the problem, be assured.

If you run a Habari blog with multiple authors and would like to be able to get an Atom feed of a single users posts, then you are now in luck.

Today I am releasing a plugin I wrote for one of my other sites, WeDavis3. Basically I wanted to grab all my posts from the family site and pull them into my lifestream here on Sillyness, Werd. A couple of lines of code later and voila, Author Feeds was born.

Download Author Feeds 1.0

Not too long ago my wife asked me to set up a blog for her, so she could stay in contact with those we left behind in Kentucky. Since I had been wanting her to blog for a couple of years now, I immediately set to work figuring out a domain for it, and designing a theme.

She didn't want a vanity domain, so I settled on WeDavis3 as a suitably short, descriptive URL for the site. I had been planning on blogging more about everyday life, so moving that to the new site made a certain amount of sense.

Now, to the fun part

Now that I had a domain, I started thinking about how I would present the content. Since there would be two of us blogging on the site, it made a certain amount of sense to present our newest posts side-by-side, with a list of older content under each persons newest post.

I quickly mocked up (in HTML the only way to design!) what I wanted it to look like, and once the template was done I moved on to figuring out how I wanted to coax Habari into giving me the content in the manner I had chose.

Thankfully, this is dead simple in Habari. In the next couple of paragraphs I will walk you through how I accomplished the layout seen on WeDavis3.com.

Ah the power of cheese, err Habari

First, it is important to understand how the theme.php file that comes with each theme works. Thankfully Skippy has already done a wonderful job providing a quick overview of theme.php, so you should go read it. Don't worry I will be here when you get back.

Okay, now that you have a better understanding of what theme.php was designed for, lets outline what we need. First we need to grab the newest published post from both authors on the site and display them, then we need to grab the newest (n) posts, excluding the newest one, from each author and display those as well.

Lets see the code

The easiest way to do this is to make 4 calls and assign them each to a theme variable. Don't believe me, check out the code:

// two custom loops for pulling the newest posts from our

// two authors.

$this->assign( 'hnewests', Posts::get( array( 'user_id' => 2, 

                                              'limit' => 1 ) ) );

$this->assign( 'cnewests', Posts::get( array( 'user_id' => 1, 

                                              'limit' => 1 ) ) );

		
// then two more custom loops for a selection of posts from

// their recent pasts.
$this->assign( 'harchives', Posts::get( array( 'user_id' => 2,

                                               'limit' => 5 ) ) );

$this->assign( 'carchives', Posts::get( array( 'user_id' => 1,

                                               'limit' => 5 ) ) );

In a nutshell, we are telling Posts::get() that we want the newest post for user 2, and user 1, binding them to hnewests and cnewests respectively and then telling Posts::get() to give us the 5 most recent posts from each user. We then process the second array on the front end to remove the post that was fetched in our first set of calls.

Now that we have created our custom loops and assigned them, calling them in our home.php template becomes laughably easy. Here is an example of displaying the newest post from user h:

<?php foreach( $hnewests as $hnewest ) { ?>

<div id="entry-<?php echo $hnewest->id; ?>" class="span-10 post">

     <div class="span-7 append-1 first">

	<h3><a href="<?php echo $hnewest->permalink; ?>"

        title="<?php echo $hnewest->title; ?>">

        <?php echo $hnewest->title_out; ?></a></h3>

     </div>

     <div class="comments span-2 last">

	<p><a href="<?php echo $hnewest->permalink; ?>#discussion"

        title="<?php _e('Comments on this post'); ?>">

        <?php echo $hnewest->comments->approved->count; ?></a></p>

     </div>

	<?php echo $hnewest->content_out; ?>

</div>

<?php } ?>

And that is it

At this point you should be pulling content for both authors and placing them in easily accessible arrays. All that is left is to decide where and how to display them in your theme. To see this code in action, check out wedavis3.com.

After much toil and sweat, mostly by other people, the Habari Community is proud to announce the immediate availability of our newest stable release.

There are too many changes to name, so you just need to go download it and take a look.