Re: Migrating from Wordpress to Habari (feedback)

[chrisjdavis]

Hey Mike, thanks for dropping us a line.

You bring up some important points, and incidentally most of your points are in the process of being addressed. We have soft launched our addons catalog that is fed from Github, and soon a host of other locations. Part of that is making sure that plugins are tagged with the version of Habari they are optimized for.

The Silo's need a sprucing up since most of them were written a couple of years ago, your point about HTML5 is a good one. We need to get on that.

For a look into the future so to speak, you can check out the addons catalog now. We are still working on on-boarding all the plugins and themes, but you should be able to get a taste of what's to come:

https://habariproject.org/addons

Thanks again, and feel free to stop by our IRC channel if you need anything!

On Wednesday, April 3, 2013 4:31:57 PM UTC-5, mratc...@mozilla.com wrote:

After one of my wordpress blog posts received over 50,000 hits in an hour and my host's server failed to keep up I realized that I need to go with a lightweight blogging engine and Habari is an excellent piece of kit. I really do like customizing everything myself as it allows me to create a much leaner blog than I could using wordpress.

I am listing things I find frustrating because they are obvious barriers to user take-up. I am capable of contributing myself but I figured that the middle of a migration is the best time to stop and take stock of my thoughts as these things are barriers to user take-up. Everything works and is very fast but here are my gripes:
- The Wordpress importer doesn't import images or videos so post image links are still pointing to their old URLs. This means that after importing I need to:
      i. Download the images from their old site.
     ii. Upload them to my new site.
    iii. Change the image & video URLs.
- No HTML5 video plugin (with swf fallback), it seems like the silo plugins all use flash.
- No Lightbox plugin.
- The recent comments block simply lists usernames and post titles. This means that if I publish a new post then the same URL is listed a bunch of times in the sidebar. Options to display username, post title and x characters from comment would be perfect.
- The silo plugins insert [almost] invalid paths e.g. http://beta.flailingmonkey.com/user/files/./freedom.jpg - of course, relative URLs would be best.
- http://habariproject.org/ has a heckuvalot of broken links, especially on the wiki but I can see that there have been changes over the last couple of days, great job.
- It would be great if there was some kind of lazy loading system where js and css files could be combined plus js files could be optionally lazy loaded.
- The disqus plugin seems to be broken for me, probably because my comments include has a different name ... this is one of the main plugins that people may want to use. In the end I decided against using it because we can use our own anti-spam plugins.
- It is very hard to find compatible plugins. Maybe the plugin xml files should include min/max version numbers?
- It is very frustrating finding out which plugin to use e.g. does it work with my version, what does it do (not always obvious by the name), is there any user feedback, are there any known issues, reviews etc.

Of course, when I have finished migrating I will push my plugin changes etc. to their appropriate locations and blog about my experience.

[Michael C. Harris]

On 4 April 2013 08:31, <mratc...@mozilla.com> wrote:
>
> I am listing things I find frustrating because they are obvious barriers to
> user take-up.

Fantastic feedback, thanks. Chris has responded to some of your
comments, and you should definitely feel free to open issues on GitHub
as well (https://github.com/habari/habari/issues).

> - No Lightbox plugin.

There's the slimbox2 plugin, https://github.com/habari-extras/slimbox2.

> - The disqus plugin seems to be broken for me, probably because my comments
> include has a different name ... this is one of the main plugins that people
> may want to use. In the end I decided against using it because we can use
> our own anti-spam plugins.

I wish I'd never written it. It was written before there was an API
for Disqus, so all it does is insert the Javascript snippet for you,
and it doesn't even do that in a sane way. In short, consider that
there is no Disqus plugin.

--
Michael C. Harris
http://twofishcreative.com/michael/blog
IRC: michaeltwofish #habari

[Chris Meller]

On Thu, Apr 4, 2013 at 11:36 PM, Michael C. Harris <mic...@twofishcreative.com> wrote:

I wish I'd never written it. It was written before there was an API
for Disqus, so all it does is insert the Javascript snippet for you,
and it doesn't even do that in a sane way. In short, consider that
there is no Disqus plugin.

We should just delete that plugin, it doesn't seem like any good is coming from it.

[Chris Meller]

On Fri, Apr 5, 2013 at 11:53 AM, <mratc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

I guess this means that if a user currently uses Disqus and wants to migrate to Habari they can't easily move their comments. I guess I need to finish migrating my site before worrying about this kind of thing.

Or just use their javascript code and stick it in your theme.

[Michael C. Harris]

On 6 April 2013 02:53, <mratc...@mozilla.com> wrote:

> On Friday, 5 April 2013 04:36:23 UTC+1, michaeltwofish wrote:
>>
>> > - The disqus plugin seems to be broken for me, probably because my
>> > comments
>> > include has a different name ... this is one of the main plugins that
>> > people
>> > may want to use. In the end I decided against using it because we can
>> > use
>> > our own anti-spam plugins.
>>
>> I wish I'd never written it. It was written before there was an API
>> for Disqus, so all it does is insert the Javascript snippet for you,
>> and it doesn't even do that in a sane way. In short, consider that
>> there is no Disqus plugin.
>

> I guess this means that if a user currently uses Disqus and wants to migrate
> to Habari they can't easily move their comments. I guess I need to finish
> migrating my site before worrying about this kind of thing.

Do you currently have your comments in WordPress as well as Disqus?
The importer should bring them across. If your comments are just in
Disqus and you use the same URLs, I believe they should just turn up
when you include the Disqus JavaScript. But you're right that there is
currently no way to keep Habari comments in sync with Disqus comments.