New Design, New Engine
by jperras
As some of you may have noticed, I recently changed the design of Nerderati.
While I quite liked the last design — Charcoal — I wanted something lighter, and that put more emphasis on the content. Moreover, I had made the decision to switch from Habari, to WordPress.
Habari is a fantastic blogging engine. It’s design & architecture is particularly well done, and is how WordPress should have been done in the first place. Their community is both active and knowledgeable, having put out three minor releases since I had started Nerderati last year, as well as releasing a great deal of plugins.
So why the hell would I switch to WordPress, of all things?
I realized that I was eternally attempting to tinker with Habari; A plugin incompatibility here, an issue with the media browser there, and a sprinkling of minor missing features. While every problem I had experienced was minor and should be expected for relatively new (and pre-1.0 release) software, they were additional psychological barriers between me and posting new articles.
Then, I had an epiphany: I was looking at my blog from the perspective of a Developer, instead of a User. WordPress’ internals might not sit well with me on a technical front, but who cares? I’m not developing for it. I’m not designing for it. I sure as hell don’t have the time to be continually tinkering with a blog engine (and I have no interest whatsoever in blog engines, not just WordPress). I have no doubt that Habari will one day compete toe-to-toe with WordPress feature-wise, but that’s not today.
So I decided to apply my normal work philosophy, and use the best available tool for the job at hand. And as soon as I stopped thinking of it from a developer point of view, the choice was obvious.
I just have to make sure to never look at the source code of this damned thing.
Comments
Interesting. I also use Habari and also view myself very much as a user and not a developer as I can’t even spell PHP.
However, although the relative lack of Habari themes and plugins to choose from is (occasionally) a little frustrating, it does mean you don’t waste time experimenting with a vast array of plugins and themes and concentrate on blogging :-)
As for moving back to WordPress to concentrate on blogging, I simply could never do that. If you’re concentrating on writing more, that means inevitably you will be spending more time in the WP admin interface, specifically ‘Write Post’.
And it was that monstrosity of a, err, ‘user interface’ that forced me to migrate to Habari in the first place.
The sheer, plain unadulterated beauty of the Habari administration interface and the simple, clean, minimal post composition screen.
@Andy C: to be fair, wordpress backend ui has most likely seen a number of face lifts since you last used it.
I like you.