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PS. Big congrats to you guys. Everything that I have used seems to work perfectly. Haven't found a bug yet and that bodes well for the future.

I'd like to hear comments on all these suggestions also.. They sound pretty on point to what I'm looking for in my community as well.. Thanks Eric.

I think the highest priority would be developing Anahita Social ™ Links that allows us to share links from the web on our story feeds. That could be a link to a blog, Youtube video, etc. In that way a link is stored as an Anahita media node that is commentable, taggable, has a unique url within an anahita social engine container and can be further shared amongst the people on a social engine container.

Blogs would be a very simple and easy app to build using the Anahita framework, however we are waiting to implement the tagging and folksonomy libraries before building the blogs. A lot of people maintain blogs on their own and push content to many different destinations rather than rely on blogs hosted on social networks. Because of that building the blog application is on our list but not on the highest priority yet.

We have implemented the required APIs in the Anahita Social Engine alpha 2 for developing all kinds of specialized groups such as: Groups, Events, Projects, Organization Pages, etc. From that point developing Group social apps (not modules!) would be a lot simpler. We will be developing Anahita Social Groups and Projects because we need them for delivering service and support the the Anahita community and partners tribes.

I'm afraid there won't be nested categories for groups, but they can be tagged. If you like to categorize them yourself you can always build extensions that extend the functionality of Anahita Social ™ Groups application.

There will be voting APIs implemented for all anahita nodes and comments. They can be used in different context such as "Likes" or vote up and down. We have several approaches in mind but haven't decided which one to take yet.

Regarding the Relationship and Personal tabs, they can be switched off on the administration side, but I do see your point. We will be making the person profile info more flexible in the upcoming releases.

JComments? Why would we want to use JComments to begin with? All anahita nodes are commentable. Anahita framework can also be extended so all the Joomla articles or other entities to become commentable and work seamlessly with the social engine. All it takes is to develop an Anahita extension that defines all Joomla articles, categories, or sections as Anahita media nodes. From that point they can be tagged and commented on without having to do funny hacks.

Anahita and Nooku frameworks are far more advanced than the Joomla framework. Building an anahita solution often takes from 50-80% less amount of coding compare to the code written using the Joomla framework. Unlike Joomla extensions, Anahita and Nooku extensions are extendible. In a lot of cases rebuilding a solution using Anahita/Nooku takes equal or less time than trying to integrate with an existing Joomla extension and the results are far more maintainable and cleaner. That is why if we decide to integrate with a 3rd party solution we will only consider it if we aren't planning to build it ourself using the Anahita or Nooku framework. Gantry framework from the RocketTheme.com is a good example.

Hmm.. I agree and thank you for most of all that you said.. EXCEPT.. I really think their should be nested categories for groups, organizations and such. I plan on using it for business or professions and such as well so it would really be important.. is it that hard to do? your thoughts? why are you not considering it at the moment? Don't you think it would be quite useful to be able to search groups by categories? A site like mine will have many different types of groups and organizations.

The taxonomy way of categorizing groups is a very old school joomla way of doing things for example when admins and moderators create all the groups and assign them in categories and sub categories ahead of time for the community members to join in.

The focus of Anahita Social ™ Groups is where people (admins and moderators included of course ) create groups and the creators are in charge of administration and moderation of a group. The context of groups can be defined within the title, descriptions, and later on using tags. Tags are added by admins, group members, or can even be extracted from the story updates. That is a far more organic approach and suitable for maintaing a very large number of groups.

We haven't taken away the option for people who would like to have nested categories, but we aren't interested in taking that approach for the social app we will be building. We will always keep our design as generic and simple as possible. You can always hire a developer to help you further extend the Anahita Social ™ Groups, or read the code and build a custom group app for your specific business model.

As I said one major advantage of Anahita and Nooku extensions over the conventional Joomla extensions is that you can further extend the functionality of an Anahita extensions without having to hack the core code.

I am not sure if this is the best thread to post a feature in but I was curious if a search plugin for anahita is on a priority list or maybe it is of lessor importance right now.

What I mean by search plugin is basically a search facility along the lines of the facebook people search. I know you have a search box at the top of the social graph list but I was thinking a search that you could search discussions, people, groups, organisation pages all under the one powerful search box? Is this something that is possible or would several different searches have to be designed per social app? I am just curious to your thoughts on this. I know personally that a main search located in a prominent part of the user interface(eg. above the sign-in for example) could be a very powerful feature and used frequently but maybe this is very difficult considering the different social apps being created. Anyways id love to hear more on this.

Thanks Rastin and Peter.

Firstly on your JComments point, thats actually really exciting to be able to use Anahita for commenting on articles. Gues my main point was for consistency for use of commenting tools within the site.

Get what your saying about groups. Bit of a bugger for me and by the looks of it others, but understand what your saying. I now thinking a custom app, where i could set the categories, then a page is created which pulls in all groups with tags, titles or descriptions with that cateogry name. Pulling info from a number of sources is far more useful.

Looking forward to the voting and more flexible profiles.

+1 for James search functionality

I'd like to again put in my +10 for Blogs sooner rather than later. Don't want to use another tool and then have to move them to Anahita later.

@james - since everything in Anahita are Nodes - people, groups, events, photos, topics, etc. - building a global search is quite possible and it is already on our list. For the Anahita Social Engine alpha 2 and 3 we have significantly improved the Nodes+Graphs+Stories architecture and performance both in the code and database. After that we could simply build a module that performs global search.

The search will basically happen on one single table jos_socialengine_nodes so it should be quite fast too.

Sounds good Rastin, I partly guessed you had this covered. I certainly do think a global search module would be a massive attention to the Anahita design. Glad to see its part of your plans even before the Beta release. Il "dream up" a few other nice goodies that I am sure you guys have on your list also haha, great patience is needed with the likes of us :)

I am trying to stick to the core functionality elements as like yourselves I believe if these are rock solid that it really gives a massively impressive base to build from. Love to hear more on the organization pages/profiles and what these would be structured from but thats for another post.

If the blogging is going to be way down the track. Would there be any chance of having an import blog function from one of the multi-user blog systems?

That we we can go forth and add blogs and know that we'll be able to move them in Anahita @ a later date.

Although I don't have much to do with this one, getting pretty good comments on JED > http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/news-production/blog/9883

what kind of time frames are we really talking? Because I WANT to commit myself to Anahita, but at the same time info have projects that require some kind of time frame. I don't want to start one platform and have to switch, and I also don't want to use Anahita and years down the road it still isn't fully developed. Can you give us SOME kind of time frame? Lack of such is giving me some anxiety about getting started. I fully understand how development works, but do you have any kind of expectations in mind? I haven't heard any mentioned yet. Thanks guys.

@Eric - The only platform that I can think of would be Wordpress and that would be on a first come first serve. That means whoever steps forward with an existing wordpress site with users and content that need to be migrated to Anahita. Only then we can schedule some time to write migrator scripts. That will probably be 5-6 months down the road. It is too far in the future for me to give you a definitive answer.

@Peter - It will be this year for sure but I am very hesitant to put out any dates here. The last time we announce some self imposed goals, people took those as promises and were trying to hold us accountable for those dates. There are still some blogs out there claiming that Anahita was supposed to be released in December 2009, which is completely false information.

Our partners have access to the project management system so they have an idea of how the development is progressing and what the milestones are.

It is simply impossible to make any predictions about the Anahita release dates. That is because Nooku framework is also constantly changing and we are constantly keeping up with them and that has been adding quite a bit of time to our release dates. The second factor is that Anahita's Nodes-Graphs-Stories architecture is very unique and it is perhaps the first implementation of its kind in the open source world. We don't have any previous knowledge of how much time it requires for every development stage using the Anahita framework, because everything that we are building is being done for the first time.

I wouldn't recommend you to do client projects using Anahita at this moment. Anahita is more suitable for building infrastructure for your business venture. For the clients you better look for out of box solutions so you can deliver and get paid. Clients who don't like out of box solutions can always hire a developer and join us as a partner.

Thanks Rastin for being totaly upfront with realistic timeframes. Promise I won't hold you to them because I understand shit happens, but gives me an idea. For me an only speaking for me, how long until you see blogs being included. If it was clost to the time it would take for a Wordpress migrator script, then I would be going Wordpress now and be happy to wait. If we we to see blogs in the enxt 2 months say, then I would wait until blogs were in Anahita. i know times aren't exact, but thats the kind of thing I was thinking.

Thanks for communicating honestly with your community... :)

Hi everybody, my first post.

I'm an co-owner of a german webradio station.We also looking for a nice Joomla community solution for 3 years now.
I've seen some community builders. But some of them are not working well. Others don't have flexible platforms or a terrible layout and bad support.

Anahita seems to be the first solution for us to give it a try. But there is some way to go before we start with it.

We would like to see some kind of blog implentation as well. But if Anahita includes a nice comment app there should be no problem to create a blog-like group-site in Joomla. For me as a radio producer it's important to have a website and a community which is flawless (also in layout). So you don't have pop ups and all this annoying things. We would use a blog for our radio speakers. So listeners can interact with them.

I read Rastin point about group categories. It sounds like a new way to find interesting posts better. I would give it a try.
But one opinion about groups and fansites on facebook. I think that groups in an old way should be ignored. To be honest. I like fansites better than groups. You can merge this two things to one for me.
There should be an option for creating a fansite account where you have this group discussion included. So people can promote it better.
I hope everybody understood that point :-)

+1 for adding links and ability to include videos AND audio, no matter where. We're an audio boradcaster. We would like also to implement an audio player for podcasts etc.

+1 Dislike & Dislike

+1 Ability for users to turn of the tabs like Relationship and Personal if they like.

I wouldn't recommend you to do client projects using Anahita at this moment. Anahita is more suitable for building infrastructure for your business venture. For the clients you better look for out of box solutions so you can deliver and get paid. Clients who don't like out of box solutions can always hire a developer and join us as a partner.
I'm speaking more of a personal project that I've had in the planning stages for about 5 years now. I'm ready to roll on it.. I've considered and played with many out of the box solutions but I didn't want to be stuck in that solution and integrations and bridges with other popular platforms just never panned out as planned. SO.. in that way I'm looking to get behind Anahita.. so I was hoping to know.. if I stick it out and wait for Anahita.. just how long I'd be waiting :)

Today's announcement may shed some light on the questions that you have been asking here about milestones Anahita Social Engine ™ alpha2 is now available to the tribe of partners

Hi Rastin,

Just wondering if you could confirm that there will be a Wordpress migrator. If so, I will use it.

If possible, it would also be great to know whether the migrator will come around the time that blogs would be implemented?

Thanks... :)

@eric I don't know what kind of confirmation I can give you. We don't have any kind of migrators listed on any of our task list items or milestones. That will be based on a first come, first serve basis depending on how many people put in requests and how much time and resources be available on that specific point in time.

There is one good news: migration from a Wordpress blog to an Anahita blog should be significantly simpler than migration from BuddyPress to Anahita Social Engine.

We have one good motivation at this point for developing Anahita Social ™ Blogs. We really would like to push Anahita in the Citizens Journalism domain, however we first want to build the infrastructure for Anahita in terms of technology and business first before we start building the blogs application.

Thanks Rastin. Looking forward to it. Yep citizen journalism is where its @... :)