Status of Anahita in the first quarter of 2011
Vancouver, BC, Canada
We would like to share with you what we have accomplished during the first 3 months of 2011 and what will be coming next for the 2nd quarter of this year.
Four Birth Releases
That’s right we’ve had 4 birth releases since the beginning of the 2011. The first one was the Anahita 1.5 which was made available for download on January 18th. To the surprise of many who were expecting to download just a Joomla component, Anahita was in fact a distro made out of 3 powerful frameworks (Anahita, Nooku, and Gantry) packaged in a stripped down version of Joomla as the container. (Please Read: Anahita is not a joomla extension).
The other 3 birth releases are Anahita Groups, Discussions, and Photos that we consider the essential apps. In fact right now we have all the stable building blocks for launching a simple but powerful social network that follows the correct NGS (Nodes-Graphs-Stories) architecture.
Launch of Anahitapolis
Anahitapolis.com is the home of Anahita project. Some people by mistake use Anahita and Anahitapolis interchangeably. Anahitapolis is the mother ship where the Anahita software is developed, distributed, and supported.
The Anahitapolis website used to be a Joomla Powered information website plus an Anahita powered social network in the background which we have been seeding with the very first community members. People and companies who were interested in the Anahita project were contacting us, expecting to see a demo, and in exchange they were given actual accounts on a young and thriving social network were all the profiles were real people and organizations.
Then we decided to merge the information website and the social network. The idea was to power everything with Anahita only. From late December last year and early January we launched the unified Anahitapolis website in 3 stages. On January 18th when Anahita 1.5 birth release was made available, we officially started selling premium memberships plans.
Would you trust a company that isn’t using their own software? We are very proud to say that Anahitapolis is fully powered by the Anahita software (except this blog that is powered by WordPress). That’s right, we are giving you the very same software that we are using ourselves to manage Anahita projects and offer support to our premium members.
The First Tribe
In the early days of working on the Anahita project we have been keeping a low profile for a while. Despite that some people and companies who were interested in our project found their way through using our network of clients, friends, partners, email or just adding us on Skype! By the suggestion of Mr. Johan Janssens (Joomla co-founder, Nooku founder) we created the Anahita Partner’s Program which essentially granted code and information access to these companies and people for a period of one year in exchange for a fee. They could observe the project as it was going on, ask us questions, provide feedback, etc. The price of the partner’s plan was only $500 however the financial contributions from the Anahita partners grew to the point that almost half of the 2600 development hours were funded by the tribe of partners.
To show our appreciations to the Anahita partners we started their membership period from the official launch date of Anahita on Jan 15th 2011 and doubled their period of membership (2 years). The partners who publicly announced their support for the Anahita project by having their names listed on our website received 2.5 years of free membership. We also renamed the Anahita Partners tribe to The First Tribe. These people and companies are our heroes and we must say the Anahita project couldn’t have reached where it is today if it wasn’t because of their support.
We have created this permanent page for the First Tribe members who have publicly supported the Anahita project.
Integration with the RocketTheme templates and extensions
In December 2010 we started using the Gantry Framework for the Anahita social networking engine and released the Shiraz template as a blueprint for the Anahita developers and template designers. On Feb. 1st we collaborated with the RocketTheme.com team to make sure their new social template called Tachyon was compatible with the Anahita and current social apps.
RocketTheme is truly the best template club in the world. They are always pushing the limits in what improvements can be done in user interface design, themes, and templates. Their team is so much fun to work with and our collaboration with them has been such a great experience.
We are also big fans of RocketTheme extensions and a number of them such as RokStories, RokTabs, RokNavMenu, and RokBox are quite compatible with the Anahita and some of them are currently being used on the Anahitapolis website. We would like to continue collaborating with the RT team and make sure that many of their great templates and extensions that can be used within a social networking website remain compatible with Anahita.
Plans for the 2nd Q this year
After having 4 birth releases our immediate plan is to invest some time in improving the Anahita templates (Shiraz, Tachyon, etc.) as well as making sure that our other existing embryo (pre-stable) social apps such as Anahita Connect, Subscriptions, and Projects become birth releases.
We are in preparation to discard Joomla! as the web platform and use the Nooku Server instead. Nooku Server provides a leaner and more efficient architecture suited for building next generation technologies such as Anahita.
We are also improving and further developing the Anahita’s core so our new collection of social apps and features can be developed.
As user generated content is growing fast on Anahitapolis website, there is a need for decent folksonomy and content search infrastructure. After the 2nd Q of this year we would like to be able to share, tag, or vote on Anahita story and media nodes as well as having the ability to associate them with geographical locations.
As always Anahita Premium members are often the first to be notified about the details of all the upcoming projects. We’ve always tried to maintain the culture of “Build first, Brag later” in this project. As we are building and innovating forward, the public will be informed about them as well.
james, 
Magnus Larsson, 
Edwin, and 
Brandon, 
Avi 9:46 pm on April 8, 2011 Permalink
Was hoping for Joomla 1.6 compatibility instead of Nooku fork
Rastin Mehr 10:05 pm on April 8, 2011 Permalink
@avi NookuServer is a far superior option.
james 12:00 am on April 9, 2011 Permalink
Hey Rastin, super post and I am extremely pleased with all the support and efforts from anahita and yourselves – couldnt ask for more to be honest. Looking forward to the Nooku server transition and also 2nd quarter
Rastin Mehr 1:27 am on April 9, 2011 Permalink
@james thank you so much. Let’s make it all happen for the Q2 FTW!
Magnus Larsson 7:34 am on April 13, 2011 Permalink
@Rastin: I would like to invest time and money in developing a new social service based on the Anahita Social Engine. Will the transition from Joomla to Nooku Server be easy to do and fairly smooth or should I wait for the NookuServer release before I start developing. You see, I am not that tech savvy as I would like to be (yet).
Rastin Mehr 12:12 am on April 14, 2011 Permalink
@Magnus so far all the updates have been easy to do and fairly smooth. We expect them to only get better.
Magnus Larsson 12:50 am on April 14, 2011 Permalink
@Rastin: Great. That was the push I needed. Time to sign up for a premium account. Feels like if there would be any questions the tight community here at anahitapolis will help and support through the transition.
James 2:56 am on April 18, 2011 Permalink
Hi Magnus, ive been using the Premium account and the updates and support is simply top notch. I too am not massively tech savy (know enough to pull it altogether) and I too am hoping that the transition to Nooku will be simple for us simple folk