A bunch of WordPress profiles have jumped ship to work with a new open source blogging platform, titled Habari.

Habari represents a fresh start to the idea of blogging. The system is 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. Habari relies on PHP5 with PHP Data Objects (PDO), and your choice of SQL database (MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite). Habari is strongly object oriented, and implements the full suite of the Atom Publishing Protocol. User-created plugins make Habari do nearly anything imaginable, and a robust theme system permits the use of several popular templating solutions.

Chris J Davies and Khaled Abou Alfa are working on the design interface, and Kubrick designer Michael Heilemann is on-board as well. Other names include Scott Merrill, Owen Winkler and Bryan Veloso. Thereâ€™s probably more, Iâ€™m piecing this together from IM chats, e-mails and these guysâ€™ blog posts.

Will Habari stand a chance? Well, of course, it might even kick ass. PHP5 offers a lot and WordPress, the main competitor if any, needs a bit of cleanup. Still, Habari is far from launch with just SVN versions to show, so weâ€™ll see. Personally, Iâ€™ll follow this one closely.