# About Habari

Habari intends to represent a fresh start to the idea of blogging. The system will be fast, easy to use, and easy to modify. New users should have no problem using and enjoying Habari. Advanced users should have no problem tweaking Habari to do exactly what they need it to do.

## What Does Habari Mean?

"Habari" is a Swahili word that means "what's the news?" It's similar to the English "What's up?" or the Spanish "Qué pasa?" The typical response is "mzuri sana", which means "very good."

## How Will it be Different?

Habari is being written with a firm understanding of the current state of blogging. Most other blogging packages have been around long enough that their responses to things like comment spam and Digg site overloads are bolted on after the fact; whereas Habari is being written from the beginning to take these things -- and more -- into account.

Habari strongly favors open, standard, and documented protocols. Atom, being both open and documented, is the prefered syndication format, and the Atom Publishing Protocol is the prefered means of remote communication with your site. This is a core feature, and not a plugin.

Habari is being written specifically for modern web hosting environments, and uses modern object-oriented programming techniques. Using these recent but well-established additions to the PHP language allows Habari to make use of PDO, enabling prepared statements for all interactions with the database. This greatly reduces the system's vulnerability to SQL injection attacks. This is just one of many benefits of modern object-oriented techniques.

Those are just a few of the technical differences, but a major component of what makes Habari different is its community participation model. Users who demonstrate a consistent level of quality contributions to the project are granted more privileges within the project.

## Our Process

### Meritocracy

Following the meritocracy model advocated by the Apache Software Foundation, the Habari project rewards contributors with decision making privilege in the project. Regular participants should be able to influence the direction of the project to which they dedicate their time and talent. The requirement for participation will be something of a moving target over time, but the barrier to entry should never be so high that dedicated people are excluded.

### Transparency

A fundamental aspect of successful open source projects is transparency. Decisions are made in the public's eye, and discussion and deliberation takes place in the open. The Habari project pursues transparency by using the Google issues tracker to maintain a record of proposed changes, and discussion associated with those changes. All proposals -- whether for code, documentation, visual style, etc -- are logged through the issues tracker for public scrutiny and input.

### Licensing

All contributions to Habari will acquire the Apache License, which is a modified version of the Apache License. For those unfamiliar with this license, the Apache License FAQ page should answer most of your questions.

Developers contributing to the Habari project itself should note that, unless explicitly stated otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion shall be under the terms and conditions of the Habari license, without any additional terms or conditions. However, plugins and themes designed to work with Habari are not required to have the same license as Habari itself.

You can find our license included in the source, and in our code repository.