Why no Wordpress, and go Habari

Why leave Wordpress behind?

I've received quite a few emails and questions on IRC regarding why I decided to leave Wordpress behind and migrate to Habari.
The reasons I'm about to cite are not to be regarded as absolute truths, they are purely my personal observations and should be treated as such.

First, a little history lesson. Wordpress came to life in 2003, when Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little created a fork of b2/cafelog.
Personally I started using Wordpress on October 26th 2004, then running the 1.2 version.

Migrating from Wordpress to Habari wasn't a decision based on any real issues with the Wordpress software itself, but rather as a personal reaction to what I feel is a flawed development process and a general feel that the project itself is heading in a direction I don't want to be a part of.

Note that I was never a card-carrying member of the Wordpress developer group, nor any substancial contributor to the project at all. My only involvement with Wordpress was hanging around in the #wordpress IRC channel and generally using the software. I also made a few cries for plugin developments, which seemed to spur at least some activity with regards to integration with Gallery 2.

Well, there are a number of reasons why I felt that Wordpress shouldn't be my tool of choice anymore;

• Lack of distinction/separation between .org and .com
  Now, I don't have a problem with people making money off open-source, thats not my problem with Automattic at all. In fact, I applaud Matt and his team for being bold enough and savvy enough to pull this off to the extent that they have done. After all, Wordpress.com provides a great service for a lot of people and they do a good job at it.
  My problem is that there doesn't seem to be a clear distinction between Wordpress.org (The Open Source Project) and wordpress.com (The Automattic business model) and to me it seems like the current Wordpress development process is geared mostly towards the hosted service.
  For me, Wordpress has evolved pretty much in spite the development process. By that I mean that community developers and theme makes has been a huge, if not monumental, part of pushing Wordpress to where it is today.
• Data gathering
  I don't feel comfortable using software that gathers all your comments, server variables and send it to a central server for processing. I've posted more details about that in an earlier, pre-Habari migration, post. One particlular thing to note is that the default Akismet Wordpress plugin sends the entire PHP $_server array back to the Akismet servers. $_server includes a lot of information, some more benign that others, but sending 'PHP_AUTH_USER' and 'PHP_AUTH_PW' can't be good. After all, if you use HTTP authentication for your site, your username and password is sent, in clear text, over the wire to the Akismet servers.
  Even other Wordpress developers question why some of the data is being transmitted at all.
  That, combined with the recent brulah with the new 2.3 update beacon and the fact that pingomatic is also run by Matt Mullenweg makes their data harvesting potential huge. Usually I'm not really paranoid, but I do try to maintain a healthy level of paranoia at all times.

And, Matt Mullenwegs posting to wp-hackers pretty much sum up my own take on this:

If you don't trust wordpress.org, I suggest you do one of the following:
1. Use different software.
2. Fork WordPress.
3. Install one of the aforementioned plugins.

I would have added wordpress.com to the not trusting part, but thats just me.

So, I took Matts advice and jumped ship. I decided to do so before that posting to wp-hackers, but it's very reaffirming to know that I have his "blessing" to do so.

Why did I choose Habari, and not Drupal or other more mature products?

Simple, really. It's a matter of personal preference. Drupal is to complex for my needs, and I don't really have any experience with other platforms out there, like Textpattern, Movable Type and Expression Engine. So, regardless of what system I chose to power my site, it would be a learning experience and probably a bumpy road.

In reality, the decision to leave Wordpress was taken well over a year ago, but when Chris J. Davis spilled the beans about Habari that did get the ball running somewhat. It did take me some months to get everything sorted and my new theme "finished", but that was mainly due to my own time restraints rather than any shortcomings in the Habari software itself.
Habari is developed by a group of people I trust, creating a new platform from scratch without having to maintain any backward compatibility with older software, and it's based on PHP5 and PDO which is a step in the right direction for any PHP application. Habari follows the meritocracy model advocated by the Apache Software Foundation.

Wrap Up

So, there it is. I've migrated, and I've explained why. I could have gone on and on about the shortcomings of the Wordpress development process and provided more examples of events that I think should have been handled differently, but I didn't really want this to become a "lets bash Wordpress post", but rather a somewhat level headed explanation as to why I decided to go another route.

Wordpress is still a great product that enables it's users an easy way to publish lots of great content and in many cases I would still recommend it to people. In fact, I still administer several Wordpress based sites, but it does no longer power my personal site. And thats just it, in my case choosing a platform is a matter of personal preference and that no longer involves Wordpress.

Habaristas: Do the Habalution

Posted by Christian Mohn aka h0bbel