Habari calls itself the “Next Generation of Blogging”. Habari is an open source, community driven blog platform. What makes it different you ask? Good question. I went looking to find out myself. Here is what they say:

While there are a number of technical reasons that highlight the differences and advantages Habari has over other blogging packages, a major component of what makes Habari different is its community participation model. Users who demonstrate a level of quality contributions to the project are granted more privileges within the project.

I’m not exactly sure I know what that means. But anyhow it’s always interesting to take a good look at any new open source blog platform when they come out and see how they might turn out. What you don’t want is one project like Wordpress to dominate the entire blog platform industry. They need some competition to keep them going.

Here are the features that Habari has. I highlighted the ones that I found interesting to me:

• Modular, object-oriented core for easy extensibility
• Supports multiple database backends (MySQL, SQLite, PostgreSQL)
• Uses prepared statements throughout to protect against SQL injection attacks
• Media silos to directly access various ways of media storage, like Flickr, Viddler, or the server’s filesystem
• Atom Publishing Protocol support
• Multiple users (authors)
• Multiple sites on one installation
• Support for static content (“pages”)
• Plugins
• Tagging
• Importers for Serendipity and WordPress

The reason I highlighted the last one is because it makes it easy for me to test out this application. I can install it, and import a bunch of content that I have written in one of my Wordpress blogs to test and see how everything works.

Keep an eye out for this blog platform project. It does have potential to be something great. Hopefully enough people contribute and get involved to give it a run at Wordpress.