I have to admit that i jumped over to using Habari for my blog mainly based on how well designed and obejct oriented the underlying API seemed from the documentation. Coming from looking at Drupal code all day, which is painfully NOT Object Oriented, yes with capitals, the code is more readable and, so far, less mysterious.

Don't believe me? Go read the instructions for Creating a Content Type. Like Drupal, it depends on function name conventions for some hooks, but beyond that everything else is nicely encapsulated in a proper class.

But I haven't developed my own plugins yet, although I have an idea for one. My main impressions are from installing it and using it.

The installation itself is very straightforward, at least on par with Wordpress. If, like me, you find yourself installing it multiple times, one can Predefine configuration settings and not have to manually enter them each time.

The admin interface is elegant and useful, certainly less cluttered than Drupal's admin pages. A simple pull down menu in the top left corner of the page lets you add posts, configure plugins, and access other admin functions.

The plugin system is in a state of flux, due to a change in how plugins are defined/discovered by the system between versions 0.6 and 0.7. This means a lot of plugins are available for the former, but maybe not the latter. It's also difficult to track down a solid list of plugins, so I've been using http://svn.habariproject.org/habari/trunk/htdocs/user/plugins with svn:externals to install and update plugins.

Its time to relaunch my blog as Bytes in the Margin. I like the new name, which is not an anagram of my own name. I was inspired by all the notebooks I have from school and work meetings, which are decorated with pen and pencil doodles in the margin.

While the title is new, the content won't really change, and I've left the Feedburner feed at RecordAsIAm still enabled, so hopefully I don't lose any subscribers.

This also gives me a chance to check out a new blogging/content management platform - Habari Project, which, from looking at the code, looks like a very nicely designed PHP blogging framework. Given that my major point of reference is Drupal, that may not be saying much. If you're particularly geek, learn Why Habari? or look at how they've implemented Plugins

Having a good debugger and error reporting can mean the difference between spending an hour hunting down the line of code causing bug and killing it quickly. For PHP, xdebug is my preferred debugger (are there others?),. Thanks to this link on debuggable.com, I was able to find a precompiled binary for OS X. Setting up Xdebug on Mac OS X (or Win32 / Linux) » Debuggable Ltd

Anyway, one of the biggest obstacles when getting started with Xdebug was that I had a hard time finding good instructions on how to set it up on Mac OS X (I finally got rid of windows, yeah !). The only good resource I found was stored in Googles cache (wasn't live anymore) and had instructions on how to manually build xdebug from source. However, I didn't have a lot of time back then and compiling would have involved setting up all kinds of additional tools. This was the point when I vaguely remembered that the Komodo IDE was using xdebug. So I did some more research and sure enough, the good folks over at ActivateState actually provide their Xdebug binaries as stand-alone downloads for all major platforms.