Anahita Open Source Social Networking Platform finally launched
Anahita Screenshot
Have you seen that scene from the Matrix where we are introduced to Neo in his dark apartment and his computer’s searching the Internet for something? That’s how I was sometime in November of 2009. Only I was looking for the perfect open source social networking platform. I was very impressed by BuddyPress, but then I stumbled upon something that raised the bar so high that anything else just didn’t seem right. It was the Anahita Social Platform.
Despite several revised road maps, changes in technology and promises of public launch in January of 2010; Anahita is finally out.
This underrated social platform is absolutely stunning in terms of architecture, UI and overall design. What’s better, it runs on Joomla and the Nooku framework. It makes BuddyPress and practically all open source social networking platforms look very outdated.
Its demo currently requires an annoying form to be filled out and it does not have free documentation or a developer community, which would turn about 90% of the their audience off, and I feel this needs to be looked into. But other than that, it is absolutely brilliant and I highly recommend this.
Looking forward to more developments from them!
SItegrinder is a neat tool but not without its share of problems. To start with site grinder uses absolute positioning on every element, whether or not that is a good or bad thing depends upon what you’re developing. For a set of static pages its a nice tool, but if you would look for variable length content, you’d need to really go into the final HTML and hack away to allow it to facilitate variable length information like scrolling content, content generated via code etc. There is an option to set up relative positioning for certain layers but it doesn’t work period.
At the end of the day all that effort in trying to redo the site really makes you question if you would have been better off splicing and handcoding it. Either that or I’m really missing something here, but thats my experience with it.