It’s Valentine’s Day, but since I’m not into this kind of stuff, I spent my time today on updating my site to the latest Habari release. The update process went smoothly and there weren’t adaptations to make. However, while I had a closer look after the upgrade, I found a few issues in my site’s theme and fixed a bunch of glitches in the comment system, the template class functions and few minor things in the main CSS set. Everything should run fine now.

Yesterday I made as small excursion to the Drupal CMS, just out of curiosity. I haven’t looked at it for a few years now, although I constantly run into it, as many high traffic sites such as java.net use it as their publishing platform. To get a grip on it, I ported my current site template to Drupal. Basically it isn’t very hard to create a template, although I had to apply a few tricks to make my template work the way I wanted it. Once Drupal’s concept is understood, it’s pretty straightforward to use it. In order to avoid fiddling with its internals, you might also make use of the vast amount of plugins and themes for Drupal. After all, I’m considering to use it for my next major web project. And before you ask: I have no intention to move away from Habari for my personal site.

Apart from fiddling with web related stuff this weekend, I also finished setting up a new home network at my parent’s house. Everything works fine, Mom and Dad are happy :-)

Today, I upgraded the site to the latest version of the Habari weblog. There are quite a bunch of improvements, yet I have to explore most of them. As last time, the upgrade process was hassle-free and I didn't encounter any notable problems (and hopefully there aren't any hidden ones).

Anyway, just in case you experience any problems, I would appreciate if you notify me.

I also learned today, that there is meanwhile a German Habari community.

After a very busy day at work (my first workday of the month is always loaded with statistics and reporting tasks), I found some time in the evening to work a little on my newly created gallery plugin for Habari.

The configuration interface is now finished (it was easier to implement than I first thought) and all the available settings can now be changed through the standard Habari administration panel. So far it seems to work well and if the plugin proves its suitability I will soon be able to make it publicly available.

Today I made the image gallery available again. Taken for itself, of course, this isn't a very spectacular enhancement of the site (since there's anyway only one gallery at the moment).

The far more interesting part was the implementation of the gallery. I wanted something that seamlessly integrates into Habari. After an extensive search on the internet I found nothing that fits my needs and so I finally decided to write my own plugin.

I quickly hacked up some code that does the basic functionality. So far it can be used to include one or more picture galleries in any Habari page or post and it recognizes thumbnail images and creates them if their are missing. To display an image it would normally, quite unspectacular, pop up the selected image in a separate window. To make it look more decent, I integrated it with the amazing LightBox2 library. Apart from this, however, all its settings are currently hardwired and it lacks a configuration interface, so there's room for improvement.

Anyway, I'm quite satisfied with the result and will probably adding the missing parts after a period of testing.

Long time, no see... There've been a lot of things that kept me busy during the last couple of weeks. I'll try to catch up in the next posts. For now, I just want to note that I today upgraded to the latest Habari alpha release. While working with alpha software always tends to be risky, it runs pretty fine so far.