Anahita™ Social Networking Engine 1.5 Birth release now available for download
We survived another week of sleep deprivation. Thank goodness for the organic coffee!
We are going to have many good news for you in 2011 and here is the first one. The Anahita™ social networking engine 1.5 Birth release codename Ambrosia is now available to the Anahitapolis™ paid members for download. This is the package that is stable enough to be used for starting your social networking project and we will officially be supporting it from now on.
Anahitapolis.com is currently powered using the latest release of Anahita™.
Anahita™ on a Joomla! Distro
This time the Anahita™ has been made available, not as a collection of extensions, but as a distro package which can be installed within minutes in 5 quick steps. The package contains 3 powerful frameworks (Anahita, Nooku, and Gantry) delivered on a lean and light version of Joomla 1.5:
- Anahita™ Framework - provides a powerful MVC software development framework specialized for developing social networking applications following a nodes-graphs-stories architecture.
- Nooku Framework – provides the basic software development framework libraries that the Anahita™ Framework is using. (visit Nooku.org to learn more)
- Gantry Framework – provides a powerful template engine framework that follows the 960 grid system. (visit Gantry-Framework.org to learn more)
I need to emphasize that Joomla! is only used as a container and web platform that provides extension management, basic user management/authentication, and menu management. Anahita makes very little use of the Joomla’s native framework and libraries and it does not run on top of Joomla. In this package we have taken out many of the legacy and unnecessary extensions that are normally included with the default Joomla!
Anahita™ social networking engine upon installation ready to go
For the upcoming releases of Anahita™ we have a keen eye on the Nooku Server as the webplatform of choice for the Anahita™ which is going to provide us many new opportunities that Joomla! wont. I must tell you that the Nooku project is where real innovation has been happening for the past couple of years.
The Embryo and Birth Releases
Traditionally the terms alpha, beta, release candidate (RC), and stable have been used to describe different stages of a software’s completion. This approach works quite well when there is a significant time between every release. That is usually the case for software that doesn’t change as fast for example a CMS or a web browser.
As we move from CMS technologies towards read/write web and social web technologies the rate of change increases and updates are a lot more frequent. This is the nature of social web software to constantly evolve as crowds of people discover new ways to connect, interact and communicate. In this context software that is not fluid enough to keep up with the changes won’t be able to meet the crowd’s needs.
In the Anahita project we learned very quickly that the alpha, beta, RC approach of releasing software did not work very well. So instead we adopted what we call the Embryo and Birth release cycle. In this context once the software is out of the alpha stage, it is either in the Embryo stage (work in progress) or Birth stage (ready to be used). A Birth release can be followed by minor releases that provide security updates and bug fixes.
We estimate that there will be at least one update per month for the Anahita™ social networking engine and apps.
Now there is always the concern that applying constant code updates to a social network will be a painful job for the website administrators. The solution to this problem is not to reduce the frequency of updates, but to develop tools that make it easy to apply the frequent code updates. Developing those tools is going to be one of our main focuses during the first quarter of 2011 as well as polishing all the existing Anahita social apps: groups, projects, discussions, photos, etc.
Thank you RocketTheme
RocketTheme.com is one our most valued clients and partners. We would like to thank them for providing us the beautiful MissionControl template that we are using for the administration back-end of Anahita™.
Coming next
We will be releasing a new Anahita social app in the next 7-10 days. This app has been requested by many of you and we will be using it ourselves for the Anahitapolis™ upon the first release. To find out about the new social app please stay tuned and follow our updates:
On Twitter @anahitapolis
On Facebook facebook.com/anahitasocial
and this blog
John B, 
John B and 6 others are discussing.
Tweets that mention Anahita™ Social Engine 1.5 Birth release now available for download « Anahitapolis Blog -- Topsy.com 2:36 pm on January 18, 2011 Permalink
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Team RocketTheme, rmd Studio Inc. and others. rmd Studio Inc. said: http://blog.anahitapolis.com/2011/01/anahita-social-engine-1-5-birth-release-now-available-for-download/ [...]
Falky 2:48 pm on January 18, 2011 Permalink
Congrats! Great work.
Your last statement makes me really curious. Which app do you intend to release within the next 7-10 days? Please let us know! This could be quite important for recent decisions.
Thanks in advance.
John Coonen 3:20 pm on January 18, 2011 Permalink
Congratulations on the release!
Sammy Sumer 3:47 pm on January 18, 2011 Permalink
Hi Guys
Congratulation.
Will Anahita ever be released to public or not? If yes when (next year or in a few months)?
If it will be released to public, will it be free or commercial and if it is going to be commercial how much will it cost?
Rastin Mehr 4:49 pm on January 18, 2011 Permalink
@Falky Thank you! It is a good app. Just wait and see
@John thank you very much!
@Sammy Thank you! Eventually yes. I cannot tell you when though. Just follow the updates and you will know.
Edwin 1:18 pm on January 21, 2011 Permalink
Hello Rastin, here -> http://blog.anahitapolis.com/2010/11/anahita-social-engine-alpha3-is-now-available-to-the-tribe-of-partners/#comment-2380 you said Anahita Alpha 3 will be released to public one beta/stable is released to members so the question is now that Anahita stable has been released to members when will Anahita alpha 3 be release to public?
Rastin Mehr 1:47 pm on January 21, 2011 Permalink
@Edwin yes it will be released when we do the next product announcement.
Edwin 11:24 pm on January 21, 2011 Permalink
@Rastin, but that is not what you said, $500 a year is a lot of money, I can not afford your product for that price and now have to wait God knows how long for another product announcement just to get access to Alpha 3, if from beginning you hadn’t mentioned public availability of the product I would have bought JomSocial but now that have played with alpha 1 I am eagerly waiting for next version but it never sees the light of day, maybe you could offer a $50 to $100 price range version for user who can’t afford $500.
Rastin Mehr 11:36 pm on January 21, 2011 Permalink
@Edwin Anahita Social Networking Engine only provides the basics and doesn’t come with photos, discussions, groups, projects, and other apps. We are giving away the Alpha3 release because we are no longer supporting it. It is a good example for hobbyists who would like to see how a NGS architecture is implemented.
The annual fee is not for the software. It is for access to the Anahitapolis resources. One year supply of Social Networking Engine code, all the apps, support groups, projects, etc.
pippo 1:30 am on January 23, 2011 Permalink
HI, congratulation for your work, but I don’t understand, i read it should be released for free
Rastin Mehr 10:50 am on January 23, 2011 Permalink
@pippo sorry mate. It is free as liberty not free as free beer!
John B 7:05 pm on January 23, 2011 Permalink
Well you are getting a few kickbacks on the $500 a year pricing. Its a shame it is so expensive particularly when a lot of us having following the project since it started in the hope we could at last get a quality social network. I believe you would get more customers and more revenue if you provided a range of subscriptions for a range of periods rather than just one subscription model. Your finance person needs to have a rethink while we are still around and before we go off and put our cash into a lesser product like Jomsocial or similar.Good luck anyway.
Rastin Mehr 12:42 am on January 24, 2011 Permalink
@John we haven’t officially started selling subscriptions yet, that is yet to come. The partner program was an option for companies and people who were genuinely interested in the project from early days and wanted to support it. Some of our clients and partners have contributed a lot more than the basic fee to make sure this project happens and we are very thankful to them.
John B 1:51 pm on January 24, 2011 Permalink
Thanks for clarifying things Rastin. I hope your reply gets to a wider audience as there is no doubt that Anahita has been keenly anticipated since it first started and the news that you have yet to look at subscriptions will be well received. Regards.