Anahita 2.1 Birth release is now available for download
We’ve just released the 2.1 Birth release packages and they are now publicly available for you to download or you can update via the Bazaar service in the administration back-end of your Anahita installation. This is an update from Anahita 2.0 release. A lot of the new improvements have gone into the new release that are aligned with our goal of becoming mobile friendly. What’s new in this release? Here we go:
Anahita’s Native Template Framework
The Anahita template framework is perhaps the lightest and most minimalist available technology today which makes it possible for the developers to do more with less code. That is very much aligned with the Anahita philosophy.
You can now build the lightest and most minimalist templates for Anahita thanks to the native Anahita template framework which utilizes technologies such as Twitter Bootstrap and LessCSS to style the user interfaces. Anahita extends the Twitter Bootstrap libraries with the Anahita less libraries and using a built-in LessCSS compiler shipped with Anahita creates a single compact stylesheet file for your template.
It is fair to say that Anahita templates are now Anahita apps. They have the very similar structure as Anahita apps; they all extend a base template where all the layouts and Less files can be extended or overwritten. When you overwrite existing less files or include your own less files, refresh your browser in the front end, and the LessCompiler creates a fresh and compact style.css file for your template. Building your own custom template now requires very little effort and it is also a lot easier to keep maintaining your template and prevent it from being overwritten whenever you update Anahita.
This is how you can configure the LessCSS compiler in Anahita.
and this is how you can set the row column ratios in your grid. You can even build your own grid by adding a row name to the templateDetails.xml file and add the following line of code in the view/default.php overwrite:
print @render('modules', 'my-new-row', array('style'=>'simple'));
The Anahita template grid is not responsive yet, but since we are now 100% relying on the Twitter Bootstrap library to create our grid and layouts, we can start experimenting with the concept of responsive layouts so the Anahita user interfaces and apps render properly on different screen sizes, tablets, and smart phones.
Improved JSON responses
Another great improvement that comes handy when developing web or mobile app services would be useful JSON responses. Click on the following link to see how a json response of my profile looks like:
- This is my profile: http://www.anahitapolis.com/component/people/person/5
- This is the JSON response of my profile: http://www.anahitapolis.com/component/people/person/5.json
Now a mobile or web app can obtain that response and use it on their own end for different purposes. If you were scared to click on those links, the json response looks something like this:
{
id: 5,
name: "Rastin Mehr",
body: "Hackerpreneur, co-founder and core architect of Anahita ® social networking platform and framework project.",
alias: "",
imageURL: {
small: "http://anahitapolis.com.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/public/n5/com_people/avatars/smalle4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5.jpg",
medium: "http://anahitapolis.com.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/public/n5/com_people/avatars/mediume4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5.jpg",
large: "http://anahitapolis.com.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/public/n5/com_people/avatars/largee4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5.jpg",
square: "http://anahitapolis.com.s3.amazonaws.com/assets/public/n5/com_people/avatars/squaree4da3b7fbbce2345d7772b0674a318d5.jpg"
},
followerCount: 310,
leaderCount: 337,
mutualCount: 233,
subscriberCount: 3
}
Many bugs have been fixed
By the help of Anahita tribe members who assisted us in testing and finding the bugs in the Anahita 2.0 release, a lot of those bugs have gotten fixed. The new package of Anahita is also about 600KB smaller, from 7.8MB down to 7.2 MB, which may not seem as much, but they do add up in multiple releases.
API Documentation and 2 Free Apps Are Available
Anahita has been available as a free download from early on. The framework API documentation and 2 social apps, Groups and Topics, are also available for free download so you can use them as examples to develop your own new custom apps. If you had any questions or needed help from the Anahita tribe, you can always sign up for an Anahita Premium Tribe membership and use all the resources that we have to make your projects happen.
Avi, and 
Will Anahita 1.6 be Joomla 1.7 compatible? Or base on Joomla 1.7 code base, need ACL.