Miklb's Mindless Ramblings

Over at Stuff & Nonsense a completely humorous retort to the provocative post by Jeff Croft on CSS frameworks, and their place in professional web design.

Michael Harris has released a port of the popular WordPress theme, Connections, for Habari. It’s good to see another port out there, obviously themes and plugins are what new user/adopters are going to be looking for. I’ll be updtating Mzingi and Harvest Field over the weekend, and hopefully work on another design port for this site.

Much has been written the last few years about project management, GTD (getting things done) and productivity on the web, I personally subscribe to probably a dozen feeds that are specifically geared towards the subject, and have tried probably every conceivable idea, all to little success.

For my paying work, I work with a company that exclusively uses Basecamp, and have come to be quite familiar with the system, but can’t rationalize paying for the service for my own needs. I do have a backpack account, but never quite have gotten a system in place there to do basic project management. Now that I have 2 themes released for Habari, and several other small projects I’m working on, mulling over, I went looking last night for something that resembles Basecamp, but was under my own control, and if I ever wanted to collaborate with someone, could easily add them in. I then remembered, Active Collab, an open-source clone of Basecamp. (Active Collab is now closed source, and a commercial product. Their old, .7.1 release is still available for download. If you want an interesting read about how open source goes bad, read the blog post and comments regarding the new structure.)

Realizing it was now commercial, and priced completely towards businesses, I read through some comments and saw reference to Project Pier, a fork of Active Collab. A new .8 release fixing some bugs and adding a few features to the .7.1 release of AC was out, so I snagged a copy and installed locally. Very easy to install (assuming you meet the server requirements), and after a quick read of how to change the god awful default theme, I was up and running, in a familiar PM environment. I set up projects for my two themes, added some milestones, todo lists, poked around and decided that though I’m the only one using it, I could easily use the messages for personal notes. And if I ever decide to put it on my own domain for others to collaborate with, I can easily migrate the database, and keep my current work intact. It also seems powerful enough that a small design house or programming team could use it for real projects, as it supports file uploads and RSS feed for recent activity. I haven’t explored email notification, however I believe it handles that ala Basecamp as well. (Like Basecamp, I don’t think you can reply to a message via email however)

All in all, a very useful tool, and I’d like to applaud the team behind Project Pier for picking up and forking in light of the changes in the development of Active Collab. I’ll be keeping an eye on it’s progress, and am looking for good things to come.

Update: New versions now available. See bottom of post for details.

Wanting to work on mzingi, I found myself a little unmotivated, so instead, I thought, maybe I can find an open source design to port to Habari, and that would get me motivated to look at the underlying code. So off I went, googling, and browsing the many repositories of open source designs, looking for something I might want to use on a personal site, and would be a nice (albeit one of few currently) available themes for Habari. I stumbled upon styleshout, and their numerous, well done themes. Ideally, I’d liked to have found one that hadn’t been ported to other platforms, but Harvest Field so caught my eye, I couldn’t help but choose it.

It just had enough fall feel to it, that I set about converting it to Habari. I wasn’t enamored with the semantics, and set about using the mzingi markup and code, tweaking for design specific features, which include having asides in the sidebar (tagging a post “asides” will leverage this feature. The tag can be changed in theme.php), recent comments in the footer column, the user pic and about content you can add via admin/options and editing your user, as well as a new twist, the next 5 most recent posts in the third column. The nifty part of this feature is that it leverages some Habari internals, and shows you the next five posts if you go backward in the page view, ie page/2 will show you the next 5 posts from page 3. This is dynamic in the sense that if you are showing 10 posts per page, as set in your options, then it will show posts 11-15 in the footer. (I will be documenting how this is accomplised in the Habari Wiki soon. Special thanks to Andrew da Silva for the help on this feature).

Another feature is the dual colored Blog title in the header. This is dynamic, in that it counts the number of characters in the title, and does a little math to split it up. You can change it manually by either editing the number it divides by in theme.php, remove it in header.php and use the default Options::out('title'), or manually add your title wrapping the section you want in light brown in span tags. Special thanks to Chris Meller for his assistance on this “feature”.

Future goals are to better style the pagination below the posts, any other suggestions are welcomed.

I had originally thought about adding a plugin hook in that column to pull a RSS feed, but I eventually thought twice about requiring an external plugin. You certainly can edit footer.php to add any type of content you desire.

As always, feedback is welcomed, and I look forward to providing more Habari themes.

Download Harvest Field 0.2

For users of trunk >r1574

Download Harvest Field 0.3.1

Demo

The original design was released with a Creative Commons license (I really need to blog about that), so I haven’t really addressed a license, suffice to say, do with it want you want code wise, just respect the original author’s wishes.