Habari

Habari is a word from Swahili meaning news or information. It is commonly used in everyday phrases such as “Habari yako?” meaning “How are you?” and “Habari gani?” meaning “What’s the news?”. The term reflects Swahili speakers’ focus on current events and information exchange, and it appears in various cultural and linguistic contexts in East Africa and beyond.

Habari also refers to Habari, an open-source content management system (CMS) designed for building blogs and small-to-medium websites. Written in PHP, it emphasizes a modular architecture with plugins and themes, a flexible data model, and support for multiple databases. The project aimed to deliver clean code, extensibility, and performance, with an emphasis on content over presentation.

Development of the Habari CMS attracted a community of contributors in the late 2000s and early 2010s. After a period of limited updates, official development activity slowed, and maintainership shifted to forks and community-driven efforts. While not as widely used as major CMS platforms, Habari remains of interest to developers seeking a lightweight, extensible publishing framework.