or "How to Code When You Don't Write Code"

The idea of "Document Driven Development" was brought up today in the Habari IRC
channel. One of the things that the Habari Community has held as a core ideal is that users, developers, and designers are all equally important to the long-term health of the project. Also, it would be foolish of us to believe that all of the great ideas for how our software should work are in the heads of the people with the skills to translate those ideas to code. However, anyone can write a description of how they feel something should work. By documenting processes or structures a framework can be drawn up that allows the coders to have a well-developed jumping off point.

One example of this is that many of our coders don't do podcasting, but it is a feature that we really want to support. This is a great opportunity for someone who does podcasting to create a document on the wiki describing the ideal process for creating and distributing a podcast from within the Habari admin interface. This allows the people working on the background code to have specific goals to work towards. By using this document driven method, we're able to take advantage of both the podcaster's experience and the coders skills to the greatest effect.

Hopefully we can work out a streamlined method of connecting experience and skills in this fashion so that Habari continues to take advantage of the strong community we've built.

A quote from Owen:

…Habari is object-oriented. Habari supports database independence. Habari uses an MVC model to separate templates from logic. Habari supports multiple template engines. Habari has a database schema that was designed for efficiency from day 1. Habari has a different kind of community supporting it, one where people who show the ability, willingness, and responsibility to act within the community get the power to do so. This is the iceberg tip.

via Chris J Davis

Today is the big day. HabariCon 2008 is happening in a few hours (I should get to bed!) in at the lovely iPony facility. I'm even giving one of the presentations later this morning. It's very exciting, but I'm quite nervous having never given this sort of presentation before. Mostly I'm looking forward to meeting more of the community face to face. I think that this conference will be a big step forward for Habari.
Solidifying roles of members of the Habari Community and mapping the road forward is high on the list of goals we hope to accomplish. I'd like to thank everyone who's been putting this together for making the first HabariCon a major success already.

Habari has a policy that themes and plugins do not include links to designers' and developers' sites. This policy is one that hopes to prevent spam, linkfarm, or other links that make your Habari site an income source for someone else without your approval. However, I feel that one of the major rewards of Open Source development is the "Hey! This is awesome! Thanks." you get when you do good work. To that end, I've made the "Credit Due" plugin for Habari. What it does is gather the author information from the active theme, and any active plugins on a Habari site and makes them available for display within your theme. You can see it in action in my sidebar under "Credits".

I've contributed it to the Habari Community, so you can view it's page on the Habari Wiki and download it there. Bugs can be filed on the Habari-Extras trac.

Let me know what you think!

Habari 0.4 is out, now with (among a lot of other cool stuff) media silos that allow you to easily interact with things like Flickr

Fan-freakin-tastic.

Tomorrow is the first official Habari Bug Hunt. If you're interested in helping code, test code, write documentation, proof-read documentation or otherwise contributing to the project, stop by #habari on freenode.net on IRC tomorrow and see what's up. If you're interested in learning more about Habari and how or community functions, this would be a great chance to stop in and say hi.