Several WordPress Developers Now Creating New Blogging Platform Called Habari

By Amit Chowdhry ● Jan 9, 2007

If I were to rank the some of the mainstream blogging platforms from best to worst, it would be WordPress, Movable Type, Blogger, MSN Spaces, Xanga, Live Journal, and then the social networks that have blogs built-in like MySpace and Facebook Notes.

But now there is a new blogging platform gearing up for release called Habari. The name Habari is based on a word that means ‘What’s the news?’ in Swahili. Habari aims to utilize new interface technologies such as PHP 5 and AJAX.

Some of the developers that are involved are Michael Heilemann, Owen Winkler, Abou Alfa, Chris J Davis, Scott Merrill and Rich Bowen, all of whom had a major role in the WordPress blogging platform development. Heilemann developed a default theme for version 1.5 of WordPress called Kubrick.

Winkler was heavily involved with the development of WordPress 2.0. Abou Alfa contributed Manji, Rin, and the Shuttle project to WordPress. Scott Merrill has developed plug-ins for WordPress in the past. And Rich Bowen has been a contributor for WordPress development as well.

The release date has not been announced yet, so this means that bloggers can speak up about what they want out of a new blogging platform.