Last week we have made the alpha release of Anahita 0.9.4 available to the people and companies in the Anahita tribe of partners. This release did take a lot longer that we have estimated because this released wasn’t simply an overhaul of the previous release. We have rewritten the entire framework and platform from scratch based on a new design philosophy and that took us more than 400 hours of development hours.
We have also passed 3000 code commits to our repository (currently at revision 3077). That means over 1500 development hours since we have started coding together this project over a year ago. Anahita has gradually become the center piece and focus of our business as a commercial open source project that is enjoying a healthy organic growth.
(Right to left: Ash, Talia, and Myself) Many thanks to our friends at the Beyounic.com for making these shirts and presenting the Anahita project at the JoomlaDay, Rome, Italy
We didn’t get the chance to make a blog announcement last week (only tweeted here and here). After releasing the code packages to our tribe members, we all immediately started testing, debugging, and reviewing our task lists and planning for the stable release date. I was simply too distracted and excited to focus on writing a blog announcement.
Continue reading ‘Marking the 3000+ Code Commits’
I’ve got about 40 emails in my mailbox. Some have been accumulating during the holiday season and also we got quite a few inquiries last night after our previous post from developers and companies who showed interest in joining the Anahita’s tribe of partners.
Working from Raw Canvas Cafe right outside our Studio
I often like to have a bit of conversation with every prospect to learn more about their projects, what they do, to see whether we have much to offer to them. In the mean time we are really busy with the development of the Anahita 0.9.4 release and in between our break time we find some time to answer back to your emails. I’d like to make sure that all of them are answered within the next 5-7 days. If you have explained more about yourself, your company, and your project you are more likely to be contacted first. Emails that are only one-line or less are going to have to wait a bit longer.
Almost all the emails are filled with kind and encouraging words, thank you so much for all of your support and the fact that you take the time to write to us. I remember one person sent us some beautiful pictures of where he lived plus many good wishes.
We can’t wait to make the Anahita code available to you and see what the collective intelligence of all of us will create as a result.
Happy New Year, I hope you’ve all had a wonderful holiday. Ash and I did take a short break, although we were both coding under the Christmas tree.
Coding and snacking at the Raw Canvas cafe during the holiday season
Anahita 0.9.4 release is not ready yet, but project has been moving forward with a steady pace, especially that more partners have joined in the Anahita project (You’re welcome to join in too!) and some of our partners have also hired us to develop their social networking projects for them and that helped us to allocate a lot more time to developing Anahita code rather than other client projects that were not social networking related. We are very thankful to their great support and we will never forget the help and courage that they are providing us!
It’s been approximately 50 days since we have started working on the new Anahita 0.9.4 release. We have re-written most of the code from scratch except the html and CSS and the user interfaces.
Continue reading ‘Anahita 0.9.4: Are we there yet?’
Ash and I would like to thank the Nooku and Beyounic teams for presenting the Anahita project at the Joomla Day Italia Rome and Nooku presentation. I must say nothing is more encouraging and energizing to us after long sleepless days of coding when a pack of truly awesome friends and brilliant minds spread the word for us with lots of enthusiasm half way across the planet. Ash and I feel truly blessed, appreciated and fortunate to meet and work with the Nooku (twitter: @nooku) and Beyounic (twitter: @beyounic) teams. Thank you for being so awesome 
We weren’t quite thrilled about our first implementation since it was behaving more like the facebook photo sharing app. I mean creating an album and uploading a list of party pictures is not exactly that exciting. Being an avid photographer and flickr addict I know that sometimes a lot of work goes into creating a great image and we want to make sure that every photograph gets all the attention that it deserve. We thought that Anahita Social ™ Photos should behave more like a blogging and expression platform for the photographers and not just an online shoe box of images.
I must say that our implementation has been partly inspired by projects such as Wordpress and Flickr.com with an Anahita philosophy in mind. In order to implement the photos and albums we have actually extended the Anahita Social Engine ™ Media Nodes API and therefore all albums and individual pictures can be tagged and commented on.
Anahita Social ™ Photos is already operating using the Amazon S3 service and of course you can easily change the settings if you wish to store all the images locally on your own server.
Continue reading ‘Sharing and Blogging Photos on Anahita’
Ash (Peerglobe Technology) and Talia (TACN Studio)
The Anahita version 0.9.4 release has been late and for those of us who are wondering here is why: Anahita 0.9.4 is a major evolutionary stage for this project. We are rebuilding a lot of the core code and data model business logic from ground up to move towards a true organic and flexible architecture for developing all kinds of social networks. This release is where the Anahita design philosophy is finally coming through and the code-base will be more stabilized according to the vision that we have been nurturing for this project. The details of the implementation and concept have already been shared with our partners and we will be blogging the software design concepts here as soon as we are done implementing them. We are following an old convention of “build it first, brag later”, because it is always easy to talk about software development concepts in public, yet having a working and functioning code accompanied with our words is what we are after.
We are migrating to Nooku Framework 0.7 right away
That was supposed to be done for the Anahita 0.9.5 but instead we decided to start on that right away. Our initial goal was to implement the 0.9.4 features according to the road-map and then migrate to entire code to the Nooku Framework version 0.7, however soon we have realized that we needed the more advanced framework capabilities of the Nooku Framework 0.7 in order to develop the next release of Anahita.
For the more technical minds: A social network’s data model is far more sophisticated than a Content Management System (CMS) or a read/write web project. Up to now we have been using the Nooku Framework version 0.6.3 which provided us models, dynamic tables, rows, and rowsets and that was a significant improvement over what the default Joomla! 1.5 provided us, but for the next release of Anahita we are using a domain driven design approach and Nooku Framework 0.7 is required for a cleaner implementation.
Continue reading ‘So what is the status of Anahita 0.9.4 Release?’
The focus of Anahita Social Engine 0.9.3 release was mainly to improve the template structure, views, and developing a set of standard CSS tags for the social engine and other existing applications. Before this release, our implementation was trying to accommodate every possible case scenario, but soon we learned that it was rather adding more to the complexity of the system than providing new options to the developers, so we decided to simplify, simplify, simplify instead!
We have also developed the first set of CSS tags that are descriptive and name-spaced properly so they won’t conflict with any other Joomla extensions that will be running on the same system.
Continue reading ‘How To Develop a Template for Anahita’
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