Until now the Anahita Shiraz template only came with a light theme. This month I had some time to develop the dark theme for the Shiraz template as well. Use the dark theme for your gaming, fashion, artistic, or that none-vanilla subculture lifestyle social networking project that you are about to launch and let your members experience the dark side of Anahita.

Change Log

The following is the change log for the Anahita Shiraz template 1.2 Birth Release:


Legend:

* -> Security Fix
# -> Bug Fix
$ -> Language fix or change
+ -> Addition
^ -> Change
- -> Removed
! -> Note?>

===Version 1.1===
^ hardcoded url for the favicon has been removed
^ manifest date, author, and desicription have been updated.
+ style2.css has been added
^ color codes have been moved to the anahita social networking engine and apps to the style1.css file
+ preset2.png icon in the admin/presets has been added
^ The preset2 info has been added to the gantry.config.php as the Dark theme


Do Update Your Shiraz Template

If you are using the default Shiraz template on your Anahita installation do update your Shiraz template. A lot of improvements and changes have been done in the new release that are necessary for the next releases of Anahita ™, Groups, Discussions, Photos, and Connect to render properly. For example all the css color codes have been removed from the Anahita™ and applications and instead they have been added to the Shiraz template. If you don’t upgrade your Shiraz template, the next time that you will be upgrading the Anahita™ and apps a lot of the colors will be missing until you upgrade your template.

To upgrade the Shiraz template, download the most recent copy of Anahita package from here and then go to the administration back-end of your Anahita Installation. Under Extend > Install/Uninstall select and upload your template zip file package.

Do Update Your Anahita Templates

If you have developed you own custom Anahita templates that are perhaps a derivative of Shiraz template, you very likely need to upgrade your css files so the next updates of Anahita social networking engine, Groups, Discussions, Photos, and Connect won’t won’t distort how your pages are rendered.

That is because all the css color codes from the Anahita™ and the existing applications have been moved to the new Shiraz template. To get a list of CSS tags that contained color codes (or styling images) checkout the style1.css and style2.css files in the css directory of the new Shiraz template.

What’s next?

In the upcoming releases of Anahita Shiraz template we would like to experiment with the iPhone friendly features of the Gantry framework so we can have pages that are more user friendly for the iPhone devices.

Some of our good members specially those who are coming from the Joomla community are under the impression that Anahita is a Joomla extension or an extension developed for Joomla. We even had a couple of people who paid a membership fee expecting to download an installable Joomla extension from Anahitapolis. That is despite that fact that nowhere on our website is presented in that context. Look on this page for instance. In fact you have found any, please let us know and we will remove it. So if we haven’t been clear enough here is another announcement:

The Anahita™ social networking engine is not a Joomla extension! nor distributed as a Joomla extension.

What are the building blocks of Anahita™?

The truth is that 2 years ago, we did build the early releases of Anahita as a Joomla extension. We even released the alpha1 as an installable extension. It was only over time that we have developed a through framework specialized for developing social apps (over 7000 code commits) and Anahita evolved to become a stand alone platform and framework as a social networking solution.

Today Anahita™ is the collection of 3 powerful frameworks (Anahita, Nooku, and Gantry) that are shipped in a container called Joomla!. In this context Joomla is only used as a web platform and stepping stone for developing the first releases of Anahita technology. In fact 99% of Anahita code is developed using the Anahita and Nooku Frameworks where:

• Anahita™ Framework: provides the software framework and API specialized for developing Social Apps.
• Nooku Framework: provides the basic MVC agile software development framework.
• Gantry Framework: provides a superb themeing framework

For the Anahita™ we are using a stripped down version of Joomla! 1.5, because the platform aspects of Joomla such as it’s extension management, menu management, and user authentication did the job quite nicely and there was no point for us to rebuild those from scratch. We have also made some upgrades to the Joomla so it can better accommodates Anahita social networking engine and Apps.

For the later releases we have a keen interest to use the Nooku Server as a much lighter web platform for building Anahita which could provide some really neat features such as multisite-social networks!

If you think this is odd, consider this: Joomla! itself has been developed using many other open source technologies. Same goes for technologies such as Mac OSX, Aptana, or Ubuntu.

The fact that Joomla! is used as the web platform, it also provides some other perks too. For example it comes with a basic CMS that is shipped with Joomla. A lot of Joomla extensions can be installed on the Anahita™ as well. That is something that you need to test and find out. We are not married to the concept of making sure that all Joomla extensions should work on with Anahita. They certainly do not suddenly become social applications either!

A CMS is a CMS

A social network is 2 generations ahead of a Content Management System. Here is the evolution path:

1. CMS: few people publish, many people read
2. Read/Write Web (web2.0): many people publish and many people read.
3. Social Web: all the aspects of read/write web, except that information is propagated and shared in small bits (stories, status updates, micro posts, tweets!) based on the directions and relationships defined by the social graph.

Joomla is a great CMS! We love Joomla for that purpose. However our goal for the Anahita project is to build next generation technologies that help people connect and collaborate in highly effective and efficient ways. Our goal is not to build and nurture CMS technologies. That responsibility is left to projects such as Joomla, WordPress, or Drupal.

We also do not think that attaching social networking to a CMS will work out quite well. It is like trying to attach wings to a car and make it fly. It will be a lot more sensible to help the passengers get out of the car and get on an airplane!

Having said that Anahita is still a commercial GPL project. Which means you can always check out the Anahita™ libraries and extension from the svn http://svn.anahitapolis.com (only Anahitapolis paid members can do that) and try to install them on your Joomla installation. If you take that approach, that will be your codebase and you will be responsible to maintain it the Joomla way.

We are going to develop automated tools that will help you easily update the Anahita social networking engine and apps right from your administration panel. Most likely these tools will not be functioning with your Joomla installation.

So how about people who already have a Joomla! powered website?

People who are using Joomla have 2 options available. We can invest some time in building Joomla to Anahita migration tools for you. Or you can also start building your social networking project from ground up using the Anahita framework and platform.

Let’s clear up the miscommunication

It is stated on our Terms of Services that  that all sales are final and no refunds will be made once you sign up as a member.

However for all of you who have signed up and paid us only on January 31st and Feb. 1st 2011 under the impression that Anahita was a Joomla extension, we will gladly refund your fees and change your account to basic free account. And please make sure you read the TOS and website content before you sign up for a service to prevent these sort of misunderstandings. To get a refund please contact us with your name and information.

If you are happy to use Anahita as it is, we will be glad to be working with you for the next 12 months. Let’s build the next generations of social web technologies together and make a difference.

The great folks at the RockeTheme have been working for us to make their new template – Tachyon - which is compatible with the Anahita™ Social Networking Engine. The template was released yesterday and now it is available to all the RocketTheme paid members.

I must say it was such a pleasure working with the RT guys. They are just amazing and I really had fun during this collaboration. So thank you so much!

• Andy Miller, the founder and CEO of RocketTheme.com for making this possible and providing last minute feature request support.
• Brian Towles for the last minute feature implementation
• James Spencer for putting together the updates in the last minute and being so patient with us.

More On the Tachyon Template and Anahita

The minimalist Tachyon template from RocketTheme provides styling for the Anahita™ main user interfaces as well as 4 of the existing Anahita social applications: Groups, Discussions, Projects, and Photos.

The Tachyon template provides a custom layout with a 2,6,4 ratio by default which is required by the Anahita. This feature activates automatically when the Tachyon template detects the Anahita framework on the system.

We have a promotion

If you are a RocketTheme.com member we are giving away 100$ off on the first 100 people who sign up as Premium Tribe members with Anahitapolis.com

That is an awesome 35% discount. Go to RocketTheme.com/promotions to obtain your discount coupon and sign up for one year Premium Tribe membership plan with Anahitapolis.com

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

Another picture done by an iphone with a dirty lens that does no justice to our sleep deprived faces

Happy New Year to all the people on Anahitapolis™ and all the people who will be joining us during the 2011. We are so thankful for all the great support that you’ve give us specially the group of 42 partners who have been working with us.

It’s been quite productive year for the Anahita™ project:

1. 6345 code commits to the Anahita™ repository until today
2. Kept up with all the updates of Nooku Framework 0.7
3. Released the Anahita™ Shiraz template using the wonderful Gantry Framework from RocketTheme LLC
4. community.anahitapolis.com social network has been powered by the Anahita™ technology during the 2010 and soon it will become the main Anahitapolis™ website.
5. Have started using Anahitapolis™ since november 2010 as our project management environment for about 10 Anahita™ related social apps and projects (Anahita™ Social Engine, Discussions, Photos, Groups, Projects, Connect, Subscriptions, and the Shiraz Template).
6. Have started using Anahitapolis™ since october 2010 for delivering support and services to all the partners and using the Anahitapolis™ Atrium as an environment to educate people who are interested to learn more about this project.
7. Have released Anahita™ Social Engine alpha1, alpha2, and alpha3 versions during the 2010. Our next release will be the public beta. In fact right now the Anahitapolis™ community is powered with the soon to be public beta code.

We have a lot of good news coming up and a lot of good plans for the first 2011 quarter. Stay tuned.

We would like to wish you a prosperous, productive, and creative year and perhaps this will be the year that you will be enjoying the fruits of your great business ideas.

to you from the Anahita project team: Rastin and Ash