take care and thank you again!

It’s called Habari.I remember hearing about this from Skippy, an erstwhile WordPress contributor who left the WP project after becoming disillusioned with how decisions were made.

Skippy was the original author of the wp_db_backup plugin which is so useful and popular that it was included in the WP 1.5 core installation and then subsequently removed when WP introduced an updated export function. Skippy was aggrieved by the decision to remove his plugin, especially when Matt Mullenweg’s less than useful “Hello Dolly” remains firmly ensconced in the core distribution.

Habari appears to have matured considerably recently, with a number of tech blogs writing about it recently, including ReadWriteWeb.

From reading the documentation, it seems much easier to extend via plugins and themes (both of which have classes that you extend) than WordPress. The habari core code supports either a single or multi site installation.

Unlike WordPress, Habari requires a more up to date installation of PHP (version 5 or higher) plus PDO must be available.

I’ve downloaded a copy and as soon as I get a chance, I’m going to install it on a test blog and see whether I prefer it over WP. If I do, I might switch all my blogs over to it.

I’ve gone through some of WordPress’ core code and found it not so intuitive because of the complete lack of class definitions. WordPress core code is comprised of functions liberally dispersed in a multitude of files. Extending WordPress is hampered by the lack of class structures. Plugins routinely break in new versions. Installing new plugins adds weight to one’s WP database which remains even after the plugin has been uninstalled. Because of the lack of a plugin class (which a developer extends to create a new plugin) to neatly control the activity of plugins, each WP plugin developer can do things which erode WP’s performance over time.

In my opinion, WordPress needs a complete rewrite using classes using PHP 5 or higher. They could make WP 2.x the last version to run on PHP 4 and remake WP 3.x to run on PHP 5 or higher. But I doubt they intend such a radical overhaul any time soon. PHP 4 support has already ceased and the last version (4.4.9) released.

That’s the first time I’ve heard of that url, even though I regularly read the blog feeds that show up in my WP dashboard.

What I would like to know is when WordPress intends moving their code to PHP 5.2.x and rewriting the core code using classes?

Writing a new plugin for WordPress would then be a matter of extending an abstract plugin class. Ditto for themes. Instead of having a theme split into multiple files, you can contract that down to one php file containing the theme class (which extends an abstract theme class) and the css file.

A class based WordPress core code would be much simpler to maintain and extend. It would make WordPress a much more robust software package.

I’d also like to see them dump phpmailer, which has not been updated since 2002, and switch to using swiftmailer which is so much more advanced. I’ve used swiftmailer in a number of projects.

Better yet, they could write an abstract mail class that they extend which would allow one to graft in a new mail send class simply by replacing it with one’s own preferred mail abstract class.

Using classes for everything allows third party developers to hack the core code by replacing entire class files with their own.

It would be a huge advance forward for WordPress but it requires that it be recoded from scratch. A good way to get rid of detritus in your code.

Since 2.1, WordPress release dates have been set many months in advance, and dates for the next 3-4 releases are always displayed here: http://wordpress.org/about/roadmap/

@Jane: I see you’ve brought your release date forward then, not that there ever was any firm release date given, though.

Will update shortly mate