We tried to come up with a good April fools joke for you guys, but every attempt was futile. So I’m afraid all the news today will be true just like every other day.

Following our initiation to share our fruit of knowledge you can now checkout code from the Anahita SVN and access the content of Anahita project management groups. Due to the privacy concerns of our Premium Tribe members we have moved all the existing topics from the project groups to the Premium Support groups where they continue to be accessible to the Premium Tribe members only, however from now on any content that is created on the project groups will be visible to the public.

So now you can:

• Download Anahita and all apps for free (as freedom and free beer)
• Check out from SVN: svn.anahitapolis.com
• View the project management groups
• Join the Anahita Free Tribe Support to ask questions from other Anahita tribe members or help somebody with their problems.

Another good news is that we are very close to have Anahita 3.0 Embryo release ready. The focus of this release will be search and a number of core design improvements.

We yet have to make the Anahita code available on GitHub. Please give us some time, because we have to make some updates to our existing development tools and scripts to work with Git and change our workflows.

First the good news:

You can now download all the Anahita apps for free and by joining the Free Tribe Support Group all Anahita tribe members can help each other out on how to use and customize Anahita. To get a Free Tribe account, please apply here!

A new chapter in the Anahita’s Growth

This is an important day for us and we are very excited about it! It’s about time to share our fruit of knowledge with the world. Last year we tackled the idea of having a group where all tribe members could help each other out, however for 2 main reasons we decided to delay the idea:

1. Ash and I were the only people with the knowledge of how to use and customize Anahita. In other words there weren’t many people with Anahita expertise to help other tribe members.
2. We wanted to focus on development and helping a selected number of early adopters who were genuinely interested in Anahita and dedicated to building and launching their social networking projects.

Looking back, Anahita started as a Joomla extension and then a Joomla Distro. It is generally accepted for commercial GPL extensions and distros to provide premium support while the upstream project provides a lot of free resources and community support.

Today Anahita is well on it’s path to use mostly native code being treated as an upstream project. That means it is time that we provide more free knowledge and code resources to help people grow and nurture online communities and to help them connect, express, and communicate more effectively. We believe Anahita as it is today makes a superior option over many traditional discussions boards, wikis, social CMS.

Many Anahita tribe members also have a fairly good knowledge of how to use and customize Anahita. That means there are more people who can help each other out. In fact a lot of more basic and common questions can be taken care of within the tribes while the Anahita core team can focus on more professional level support.

So what type of free resources are we talking about?

1. We are now offering the Free Tribe Support group where tribe members can help other tribe members with their Anahita related questions.
2. From now on all Anahita apps will be available for free download.
3. Anahita Project groups will soon be accessible as read-only to public and registered users.
4. We will be providing basic documentation on installing, troubleshooting, and building basic apps for Anahita.
5. An IRC channel for the tribe members to interact in real time.

We want the free tribe support group to be as self reliant as possible by the help of tribe members who wish to help other tribe members. The Anahita team may or may not answer questions in the Free Tribe Support Group. That really depends on how inspiring those questions might be; also we make sure that all the support questions in the Premium groups are answered first within 2-3 days before we answer any questions in the free groups.

Your participation in the Free Tribe Support Group is 100% voluntary. Do it if you enjoy  this activity and of course those who give back and share the fruit of knowledge will naturally earn knowledge authority in the Anahita tribes. All the content in Anahita are licences as creative commons so sharing the fruit of knowledge from the Premium Tribe groups to the Free Tribe groups or your blogs is not only allowed but also encouraged. You are the knowledge carriers and story tellers of Anahita.

It will probably take us a couple of months to completely execute this plan and it will be done in multiple iterations. We are getting a lot of good advice and tips from our friends in the business and open source community such as Mr. Johan Janssens and Mozilla teams.

If you have any questions or comments, please let us know. We will be happy to read what you have to say and answer your questions.