A social website often needs to have a discussion board either as a stand alone social app or as a part of other social hubs such as Groups, Events, Organizations and such.
In the quest for finding a simple and organic design inspiration for developing a discussion board for the Anahita Social Engine I have been snooping around in different projects.
There are some existing forum extensions available for Joomla. In fact we did try ccBoard and realized that with some modifications to make it work with the Anahita Social Engine user profiles, it would work perfectly. So here is one good candidate.
We have also been using PHPBB3 for Tazzu Community and it seems like a complete forum out of the box and the UI is pretty good although I’ve found it to be a little too bulky for our purpose. We want something much more nimble and lighter. Besides, the user management in phpbb3 and the way it has been coded is not really our style so we’re not too sure about this one!
I must admit I have been fascinated with BBPress for quite some time. This is the discussion board app developed by the same folks who developed Wordpress and these guys have a nice touch when it gets to getting the usability right.
Continue reading ‘Developing the Anahita Social ™ Discussions Application’
By nature social networks grows in storage size exponentially. For a community of just 250,000 people the total size of only the avatars are about 20 Gigabyte. That’s a lot of space but thanks to the services like Amazon S3, Box.net and other cloud storage, it’s a lot cheaper and safer to store users assets (images, videos, documents and etc) somewhere on the cloud rather than storing locally where your server is being hosted.
This approach however imposes a challenge for the third party extension developers. They have to hard-code the storage API they want to target and build their application in a way that works flawlessly only with that storage. On the other hand, this forces the users of the extensions (the people who download the extension to use it on their Joomla installation) to use only the intended storage service by the developer.
We’ve solved this problem in Anahita by introducing the Virtual Storage concept. Developers can use Anahita Virtual Storage library to read/write data without a need to know about the final storage destination. 
The storage destination is configured by the admin through the Anahita System Plugin in the Joomla administrative back-end.
There are two ways of writing data using Anahita storage library, publicly or privately. If it’s public then everyone has read access to the data. This is good for static data like avatar and albums images. If it’s private only the application has access to read the data. In both cases the data is only writable by the application.
Soon we are adding the ability for the other developers to implement their own storage system. This is specially useful for the corporate intranets who have in-house distributed storage that’s not accessible from the outside of the network.
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