Every product has a life cycle. When WordPress gained popularity it looked as if Blogger.com would be confined to history. Many who were stuck with Blogger solely because they weren’t interesting spending bucks on maintaining an online identity, with the hosted solution WordPress snatched a major share of users from Blogger.com’s pie. But to the misfortune of WordPress Blogger.com evolved, the new Blogger.com is probably everything people vied for and with Blogger.com now offering free hosted solution with your own domains it was clear that difficult days are ahead for WordPress. Today a Google search for “WordPress to Blogger” won’t return you empty handed. Astounding it may sound, but many are actually considering migration to Blogger.com, apart from the usual allegations of WordPress being slow they have been tired of limitations such as not being able to tweak the theme code, or put their advertisement among other things.

HabariIt may or may not be for the love of Blogger, all of us need a change, probably the reason we keep on changing our templates and themes so often. When Logahead came people immediately started touting it as a replacement of WordPress until the poor chap has to proclaim himself. Logahead wasn’t too superior a blogware but it did show a novel way to do things, for example getting rid of the cumbersome Admin console of WordPress an the AJAX way to effortlessly deploy widgets. If you ask me the refined UNU version of Logahead is far more superior to the original and can give a competition to the Goliath.

The craving for the much needed change did not spare the creators of WordPress either it seems now. WordPress was slated as the “ultimate blogware” but the core team of WordPress comprising of Chris Davis, Khaled, Michael (the Kubrick creator) has now left WordPress and are working on the nextgen open-source blogware termed as Habari, a Swahili word for “What’s up”. Habari would not be forked from WordPress (WordPress was based upon B-2), it’s been written from the scratch and would sue the most modern technologies such as PHP 5 (and PHP Data Objects), Habari code would be Object Oriented and Database independent.

The creator of WordPress Matt modestly wrote that Habari would probably be Drupal meets Serendipity. He not only pledged his support for the initiative but also offered his servers. Despite of this the unrest in the WP camp is quite noticeable. Some said that this is the outcome of politics of people pissed off from not getting appointed at Automattic. Habari’s Skippy clarified this wasn’t so but wasn’t wary of terming the spam-prevention capability of WordPress as Band-Aid code. The Habari team is hopeful of cutting a relapse before 6 months and yes this will have the capability of “importing from WordPress”. Owen on the other hand said that there are no hard feelings and he would continue to be with WordPress as well.

Right now the only blog running on Habari is Chris’s, it might not seem too different but the team claims it would be fast and modern. Habari may be used with other databases as well, apart from MySQL. I wonder how popular it would be until they go for a hosted solution. If you ask people like me, who pay for their hosting, PHP 5 is not what my Hosting service would provide in near future and even I would be wary of going for it, it might break my other applications. yet I am excited by the fact that Habari is talking of community and using new things once in a while is so much better.