Tienda by Rafael Diaz-Tushman, President & CEO of
Dioscouri Design
Can you tell us briefly about Tienda and why you think its different to other offerings?
Tienda is our new ecommerce extension that is built natively for Joomla. We built Tienda with the site’s administrator in mind, meaning we wanted to make it as simple as possible to install, configure, skin, and customize Tienda.
Its main features are in fact its main differentiators from other offerings:
- Built using Joomla’s MVC framework (with a few enhancing twists of our own
- Uses Joomla’s template system
- Extensible, easy-to-use, friendly, & informative interface
- Commercially supported by the developers and my support team
Why do you think Tienda will be successful?
Tienda has all the parts it needs for it to become a successful project: a consistent & steady team of developers and supporters, tempered organization, realistic goals & measured progress, vested community volunteers, commercial backing, and most importantly, an open ear to the requests of its burgeoning user base.
What’s your favorite feature about Tienda?
The dashboard. As an executive and a site administrator myself, there’s nothing more satisfying than to have an informative dashboard that gives you an executive summary of your business’s health every morning. One click & bam! You know exactly what you need to know. And since the dashboard is modular, you can add any other summary information to the summary, even if it’s from other extensions.
What’s the feature you’d most like to add?
We’re working on the “Users as Vendors” feature right now for the Enterprise version of Tienda. That’s the feature I’d most like to see. Once it’s finished, you’ll be able to set up an Amazon-like store where 3rd parties handle the product catalog & orders. I’m very excited to see this feature finished. It will be the primary differentiator between Community and Enterprise Tienda.
How is Tienda licensed and priced?
GPL GPL GPL. Everything we build is licensed under the GPL. The Community version is free as in beer), but we do offer Support Subscriptions for it at $99 (6-months) and $179 (12-months)
The Enterprise version hasn’t had its price set yet, but will be in the $200-$300 range.
Where/how can people get a demo?
Come to www.dioscouri.com to get the free download or to see video previews. If you have trouble spelling or remembering our name, just go to the JED and search for “TIENDA” J
Tienda and 1.6? Discuss….
There is much that Tienda will gain from the enhanced ACL system in 1.6. Imagine being able to set product prices based on any kind of user group you want!
We’ve built Tienda using the Joomla MVC framework and we monitor the 1.6 development closely. When 1.6 is ready for release, Tienda will be ready for it.
Anahita Social Engine â„¢ by Rastin Mehr (rmdStudio Inc.) and Ash Sanieyan (Peerglobe Technology Inc.)
Can you tell us briefly about anahita and why you think its different to other offerings?
Anahita is a framework for developing social networking apps, a platform for installing and hosting them, and a design philosophy based on the Nodes+Graphs+Stories (NGS) architecture. Anahita social engine, extensions, and applications are available as components and plugins that are installable on Joomla 1.5
Anahita provides the same reusable basic elementsnodes, graphs, storiesfor developing all kinds of projects with a social networking context. If you have played with Legos as a kid you know what I mean! You get to use the same reusable bricks to build all kinds of Lego projects: Star Wars, Fire Fighters, Airports, Hospitals, Cities, etc.
A lot of other offerings are like that big fancy police car or red fire truck that we got as kids. A big fancy police car or red fire truck is quite impressive only for few hours, but they are useless if you want to launch and experiment with different types of projects. Legos are much better for the curious and creative kids.
Why do you think anahita will be successful?
We have an intuition!
What’s your favourite feature about anahita?
The Anahita NGS architecture and design philosophy that provides many software design flexibilities and opportunities.
What’s the feature you’d most likely to add?
The best feature will be not bundling the platform with too many features and keep it as generic and customizable as possible.
How is anahita licensed and priced?
Anahita code is accompanied with the GPL2 License. Being a commercial open source project, the code is free as liberty, but not free as free beer. For the time being developers, development companies, or those who are simply interested could pay 500.00 USD annual fee and gain access to all the existing resources.
That is:
- direct SVN read access to the Anahita repository
- access to the Anahita project management system, task lists, files, milestones, etc.
- Anahita Google group and skype chat group until we launch Anahitapolis.com as the main support and distribution website.
Partners can learn how to develop Anahita through peer support which means interactions with the Core team and other partners in our tribe. They will also be the first to be informed and consulted about the upcoming developing stages. They can also use the code within the terms of GPL2 which means they can read and modify the code and there are no limits on how many times they can use the code for their projects.
In other words: You need to join the Lego club to play with the Legos and at the end of the day you get to take your projects home with you.
There will be a plan with a lower fee for those who don’t want close involvement with the project and are only interested in obtaining the code, updates, documentation. We will announce that when the time is right.
Where/how can people get a demo?
There is a demo website that we are maintaining using the most recent stable code. In order to obtain a demo account, being a partner is not mandatory, but we’d like to meet people who have a social networking project coming up and are willing to share with us more information about themselves, their project or company. So when you contact us please tell us a bit more about yourself and your upcoming project.
Anahita and Joomla1.6 ? Discuss….
Assuming that J1.6 will be ready and stable anytime soon we don’t see any major obstacles migrating Anahita to it. Anahita is only using 4 aspects of Joomla: Template Engine, Extensions Manager, Menu Manager, and Basic User management/authentication. Other than that almost 99% of the Anahita code is written using the Nooku and Anahita Frameworks. Since Anahita doesn’t rely on the Joomla core libraries as much therefore migration from 1.5 to 1.6 is only the matter of Nooku framework being able to install and operate on J1.6
Also, checkout our recent interview of Stian Didriksen at joomlashack.com of another great new extension, the new Ninjaboard forum.