WordPress may be one of the best blogging platforms around today, but that hasn’t stopped a worldwide community of developers from thinking they can do better. Desiring a more open environment where individuals can contribute and extend the project with their own work, they designed a platform called Habari to utilize a unique community participation model. Within this model, users whose contributions are consistently of a high quality are granted more privileges within the project. What has resulted from their efforts so far is a next-gen blogging platform that may eventually give WordPress a run for its money.

Some of the active developers of Habari include Michael Heilemann, Owen Winkler, Khaled Abou Alfa, Chris J. Davis, Scott Merrill, and Rich Bowen, to name a few. If you’ve been heavily involved in the WordPress community, then you may recognize some of these names already. What they, and a hundred or so other developers worldwide, are working on is a new blogging platform with a fresh design and backed up by clean code. As one developer says, “Habari is just as much a way of coding as it is a blogging platform.”

Habari Features

Also like WordPress, Habari supports static pages, Atom publishing, tagging, multiple authors, and multiple sites under one install. There are even importers for Serendipty and WordPress available to help make the transition easier.

Because Habari is still a work-in-progress to some extent, it may not be ready for the newest of bloggers just yet. One day though, the developers hope to appeal to both them and blogging experts both. They want to address the pain points that make blogging difficult for new users, but they also want to bring the focus of blogging back to content creation. That’s why the compose page is clean and simple by default (see below). They also want to focus on ways to make your blog the place where you actually blog, not the place where you have store videos and photos.

Tags: abou, atom, community participation, developers, extent, fresh design, habari, importers, khaled abou alfa, khaledalfa, model users, open environment, participation model, platform, platforms, privileges, rich bowen, scott merrill, serendipty, unique community, winkler, wordpress, work in progress, worldwide community