Sharing and Blogging Photos on Anahita
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.
First you get to use a nice Ajax multiple image uploader to batch-upload a group of your pictures.
Like any blogging platform the application provides a photo stream with author’s name, time stamps, and other basic operations such as a delete and view link.
The photo stream also provides an RSS feed. Once our implementation is more polished, depending on the author’s privacy settings, all the main pages of the photo sharing could become available publicly too. That means we get SEO friendly pages as well as Search Engine Friendly (SEF) urls.
The photo sharing app also stores multiple sizes of each image which can later be used for different purposes such as uploading a file and then sharing the link on other websites.
On the photo or album view, the author or the Admin can easily edit the title and save it using a seamless Ajax call.
Or edit the photo or album description and save them using a seamless Ajax call
Then you can add the photo to an album or create an album right there
and everybody can leave comments on the photos and albums
You can actually assign your photographs to more than one albums so there is a many-to-many relationship between the photos and albums.
and on the album view you can simply drag and drop one of the photograph’s icons to set the album cover.
All the albums can automatically generate a slideshow
When you upload images or create albums, stories are generated in your activity feed for your social cloud to see
and there is a photo stream gadget on every person’s profile
You can see more screen captures on my flickr account if you like
What you see is only the first release of our photo sharing and blogging social app. This is an open ended project with many more updates and improvements to come. In the next immediate release, our goal will be updating the code for the Anahita release 0.9.4 code and slowly adding more features such as more elaborate ways to organize albums and photos and also folksonomy features so community members could tag their own or each other’s pictures.
Comments, opinions? please post them here and follow us on Twitter: @anahitapolis
Richard Feenstra, 
James 11:36 pm on November 19, 2009 Permalink
I love the concept! Can’t wait to use it.
Jon Lackey @zuno 11:16 am on November 20, 2009 Permalink
Looks amazing, and the interface is nice and clean. Well done.
Rastin Mehr 3:32 pm on November 20, 2009 Permalink
@James @Joh Thank you
Dodawanie zdjęć w Anahita Social Engine | elimu blog 3:11 am on November 21, 2009 Permalink
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Tom 2:49 am on November 22, 2009 Permalink
Anahita looks very polished. Not cluttered, simple but not simplistic. This is much appreciated. However, I would like to point out that what will make or break this app is the groups feature. imho this is where most of the useful functionality and interaction takes place. Photos, classifieds, maps integration and calendars are all nice, but groups are the meat and potatos. I would like to suggest you include a lot of functionality in the groups feature. Calendars are a must so groups can publish their events to everyone. A sort of mini-wiki would also be nice so groups can organize their papers. And formatting that enables pdf printing is never wrong. Moderation of group blog entries are really useful. And the ability to run more than one blog or even a sort of board inside the group would be a bonus.
Please refresh your blog often. Also, what are your plans regarding Joomla 1.6 which is not too far away now? Best of luck to you all 
I feel you have a great app and I want to try it asap
Rastin Mehr 3:01 am on November 22, 2009 Permalink
Hi Tom, thank you for the wonderful comment!
Group feature is on the way. Not only that, all kinds of group-like features are on the way in much more flexible architecture than the other available variations in the Internet ecosystem today. We have a habit of not talking about something in public unless it has already been developed.
So as the Anahita 0.9.4 and 0.9.5 are being released we will be explaining more on the anahitapolis blog. What you see right now is only a glimpse of what will be a truly organic architecture
Regarding the features that you have mentioned I must say that your intuition is right, just wait a bit longer, good software development takes time and proper foundations. The good news is that building new features is getting simpler at every release.
As for Joomla 1.6 we are watching the codebase and also we are in touch with the Nooku team on a daily basis. So far no comments. We haven’t modified the core of Joomla 1.5 in order to develop Anahita and I don’t see why it shouldn’t work with 1.6 either.
Thank you so much for the kind words
Trond 8:41 am on November 23, 2009 Permalink
Being very much desperate to see your first public release, it is certainly great to see a glimpse of what to come, here on your blog. This is very promising.
Thank you, and keep it up!
Richard Feenstra 8:35 am on November 26, 2009 Permalink
I’ve been using Jomsocial for a year now. Works good, but Anahita looks, feels sounds much better. Can’t wait to test some! Any date for a realse or beta? I sure like to test it on my 6000 members community.
Keep up the good work!