The biggest road block that I had to deal with was keeping my old crappy textpattern URLs that I had never changed to nice URLs functional. Which sounds easy enough using some regular expressions to do some mod_rewriting in the .htaccess file (if that in itself sounds easy to you).
The URLs that I was using with textpattern and that are now indexed by google are as follows:
http://www.mindgarden.de/index.php?id=123
which had to redirect to something like
http://www.mindgarden.de/?id=123
The problem being that habari does some heavy rewriting in the .htaccess itself. The guys in the habari IRC channel were incredibly helpful and helped me figure it out. So in case someone out there tries to do what I did, here’s what worked for me in the end:
As you may or may not have noticed, I finally moved mindgarden to a new server with a new design and new blogging engine.
We’re now using habari instead of textpattern. I was always a big fan of textpattern but development wise there has been nothing going on with it for what feels like forever. So we switched to habari, trying something new. The admin backend is gorgeous and everything works really well so far. Apart from some htaccess trouble that I ran into when redirecting the old URLs to the new ones. But the habari guys in their IRC channel were incredibly helpful, so got that sorted as well. I might be reporting about that a bit more in another posting.
I’m personally quite happy about the design. The idea was to simplify the old design while preserving the general mindgarden look. It’s still a bit rough around the edges, but overall I think it works quite well. There are still a lot of details to be straightened out and no-one seems to find out that you can expand the header at the moment. But I’ve used a few new semantic HTML5 elements and quite a bit of CSS3 on top of it. CSS multi-columns for example and media queries so you get more text columns of text of you enlarge your browser window. I will be writing about that more in future posts as well.
Im Januar 2007 habe ich hier im mindgarden schon mal von habariberichtet Mittlerweile hat sich das Tool in weiterentwickelt und ist in Version 0.5 erschienen.
Michael Heilemann, der am Admin Interface von habari arbeitet hat jetzt sein blog “binarybonsai”h:ttp://binarybonsai.com/ auf habari umgestellt und stellt die Oberfläche in einem kleinen Screencast vor:
