jemjabella

Favourite Habari Plugins

One of my favourite things about Habari is the fact that it's super lightweight (unlike Wordpress which ultimately serves hundreds of bytes of old code that powers functionality I don't use). As such, anything beyond the basic blog — write, read, comment — requires a plugin, enabling me to have total control over my site. To encourage those of you considering Habari, I thought I'd share the Habari plugins that I use to make my blog great (in no particular order)...

• RN Monthly Archives Plugin — I use this plugin to display my 12-month list of archives in the sidebar, as well as my full archive
• RN Related Posts Plugin — this one is new to me, brought in specifically for this theme. It shows related posts based on tags in the sidebar of individual posts, and is loads more accurate (so far) than my old attempts at related posts!
• Comment Notifier — this one sends your comments to my inbox so that I don't forget to approve them! ;)
• Defensio — personalised comment checking to help filter spam. Admittedly, this one is only temporary because I plan on writing my own plugin. Mixed feelings on effectiveness, but it's better than nothing!
• Edit: Auto-Approve — as recommended by Melly. Auto-approves non-spam comments.

So, have I convinced you to try Habari yet?

24 Hours with Habari

So here we are, 24 hours after moving nearly 2 weeks worth of work (on and off) and it's still standing. I'm impressed. :) Anyway, given that I know my conversion is generating a lot of talk about Habari and interest amongst you guys I thought I'd collect together some of my initial thoughts. Let's start with the negative, because then we can end on a positive note...

• There is no comment mailing built in. I woke up to a near-empty inbox and spent 5 minutes trying to figure out where the world went to. Turns out, all your comments were hiding in here waiting for me.
• The feed is doing something wonky with some of my older posts. Three old book reviews are sat in there, despite being backdated in the blog.
• The Habari autop() function ends paragraph tags before <code>, treating it like a block-level element. It's an inline element.
• The Spam Checker plugin is not the greatest. I'll either be improving it or rolling my own.

With that said, these are easily outweighed by some of my favourite 'features':

• Theming was incredibly intuitive for me. I think if you know what a PHP include does, you should be able to very easily create your own theme after a quick glance at one of the available themes. (It didn't take long to code up this theme, although admittedly the design is from Scott.)
• The admin panel is FAST. I've had WP Dashboard crash Firefox more times than I care to recall. No such problem here.
• No MySQL connection errors yet. (If you remember, this was one of the problems I had with my first blog system.)
• The reception from the Habari community on twitter, in the comments on my previous entry and in the #habari channel has been fantastic.

Of course, this post wouldn't be complete without a spot of code...

To fix the autop() <code> bug, open /system/classes/format.php and change (line 117ish):

$regex = '/(<\s*(address|code|blockquote|div|h[1-6]|hr|p|pre|ul|ol|dl|table)[^>]*?'.'>.*?<\s*\/\s*\2\s*>)/ism';

to:

$regex = '/(<\s*(address|blockquote|div|h[1-6]|hr|p|pre|ul|ol|dl|table)[^>]*?'.'>.*?<\s*\/\s*\2\s*>)/ism';

(Interestingly, I googled this to see if anyone else had brought it up and noticed a previous version of autop without code, as above.)

I don't expect to have the time to make too many of these Habari posts, but look forward to seeing how the blog holds up.

I've Converted to Habari

I recently asked for recommendations for a blogging script through .net forum to fulfil the requests of those wanting something more professional than FanUpdate, but without the relative bloat of WordPress. @otherniceman was kind enough to point me in the direction of Habari and not only was I impressed enough to have used it as the base of several recommendations, but I've also converted my own site to it.

You may remember that it was only last year I recommended Chyrp. Indeed, I still like the quirky little script. Unfortunately however, with over 18,000 comments and nearly 1,000 entries my blog does not like it. Even today where my traffic is half what it was in the summer of last year — not blogging for 12 months does that to ya — Chyrp cannot cope. With my plans to cut the crap to free up some time, I need something that's going to keep me live without daily babysitting.

Habari is in most respects almost like a "WordPress lite" (weighing in at some 5MB smaller than WP), something which many of us have been crying out for over the years. With that said, it's not something new and just on the shelf... development started in 2007 as far as I've been able to gather, with some of the original WordPress contributors getting it where it is today. The project appears to be maintained by the community, for the community and has a tight security record so far.

As part of the conversion I have, as previously touched upon, cut out some of the crappy older articles from the site and have converted the rest into blog entries. Likewise, old reviews have been moved over and can be found using the tag "review". The scripts page has been compressed down into one block instead of multiple pages with inspiration drawn from Cine's script page.

Converting hasn't been a quick task simply because of the mass amounts of content and entries, and I hope that it pays off in the long run. In the mean time, you're more than welcome to report bugs to me in the comments below or via e-mail: jem@jemjabella.co.uk

Known Issues

• Half of my redirects aren't working. Arse.
• Most of my entries are untagged, giving some empty links (e.g. Pants on right)
• Comments lists are as of yet unstyled
• Feedburner has a cached installer page instead of feed.
• Feed featuring some very old posts (sorry)

NinjaLinks Update: Version 1.1

As a distraction from working on my own site, cssbake, and all of the other projects I'm way overdue on, I've done a huuuuge round of bug-fixes on NinjaLinks. Version 1.1 is now available to download.

Overview of fixes

Key: 'M' minor changes - aesthetic or non-essential fix / 'N' normal changes - required bug fix / 'I' important changes - security fix (none this release)

• (M) Fix typo in config.php
• (M) Allow spaces and dashes in category names - manage_categories.php
• (M) Fix order of updates displayed - functions.php
• (M) Add ownername field - addlink.php / manage_links.php / updatelink.php
• (N) Remove strtolower from URLs (affecting UC links) in addlink.php / manage_links.php / updatelink.php
• (N) Turn off errors - functions.php (not necessary once live)
• (N) Undeclared variable error in manage_categories.php
• (N) Allow foreign chars in link names / owner names etc - addlink.php / functions.php / install.php / updatelink.php
• (N) Smoother install process - functions.php / install.php / header.php
• (N) Better install checking (if install file exists etc) - functions.php / header.php
• (N) Better error reporting - functions.php
• (N) Improved spam protection - config.php / functions.php / addlink.php / contact.php
• (N) Option to disallow duplicate links - config.php / addlink.php

Installing a fresh copy

Download the script, set up database, customise config.php and run install.php as normal (as covered on the NinjaLinks page). Delete install.php and update-1-1.1.php. You do not need to run update-1-1.1.php.

Upgrading from version 1

BACK UP YOUR EXISTING FILES AND DATABASE

Download the script, copy over your existing configuration settings into the new config.php (be sure to set the new options where appropriate). Customise your layout (header/footer/stylesheet) or copy over existing data from back-up. Delete install.php from the folder. Upload all of the new files, over-writing the existing ones (or, delete the files and re-upload fresh). Once uploaded, run update-1-1.1.php in your browser (at http://your-website.com/ninjalinks/update-1-1.1.php or whatever your URL is). Once completed, delete update-1-1.1.php.

Any problems with installation or upgrading should be posted in the tutorialtastic section at codegrrl.

Important note: the NinjaLinks install/update now forces UTF-8 character sets in the database to allow foreign characters. If your NinjaLinks database is shared with another script and you aren't sure if that uses UTF-8 or would the affect of setting it would be, be doubly-triply sure to make plenty of back-ups. That said, it's fairly common for scripts (such as the likes of WordPress, etc) to use UTF-8 anyway.

In Which I Bullet Point

• Didn't manage to spend any of my week off clearing my inbox. Oops. Did however manage to see my niece and nephew, as well as tidying up around the flat.
• BellaBook4 and BellaBlocks (1) very nearly ready for release. Now that my Internet connection has stopped dicking about I may be able to get everything finished.
• Have ordered a 'new' phone. Although I don't use my phone very often, the Nokia 7373 is really starting to piss me off. (Various reasons.) I've bought a Sony Ericsson K800i from eBay (2nd hand). I've had Nokias for over 10 years, so it'll be interesting to use something else.
• Feeling very pregnant of late. Heavy, forgetful, no balance whatsoever and still being sick in the mornings. However, I've only put on approx 6lbs out of the "average" 12lbs by this point. I have no idea if that's good or bad.

In non bullet-pointy news, I'm thinking of converting to Chyrp again, as there's been another release. Need to test to see if it will support the size of my database yet. Running my own blog is all well and good but I still only have the ability to blog from the control panel. Editing posts, comments etc is so low on my priority list it's never going to get done, and while PHPMyAdmin rules it's tedious to have to maintain the site through it (and I'd rather cut off my fingers than use WordPress again).

Update (21:03): BellaBlocks is now live. As usual, bug reports etc to jem@jemjabella.co.uk