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Mar 15
Joomla Community Components - The replacements for the well known "Community Builder" |
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Since the days of Mambo - Joomlapolis Community Builder (in those times it was Mambojoe's community builder) - was the only way to enhance the scarce profile of Mambo/Joomla. CB is now one of the most popular Joomla extension in Extensions Directory and an Editor Pick (one of the few picks there are).
Althou there is nothing wrong with Joomlapolis Extension, with time appeared some interesting alternatives to it. There are several Free, some Commercial and some of them even Encrypted (Joobi). We analysed two free Extensions that look very promising (and are both now in Beta stage)
Joomunity
It’s fresh, it’s new, it’s beta.
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I liked the way they created the install (it’s something like the installer for yahoo that is small and then downloads a lot of other things in order to install the real app), yet it did not work for me as intended. Maybe it is my windows installation that is bothering (I have tested it in Apache under Windows XP64), or maybe some other weird setting I have – but it could not install the files from the remote repository. I think it was the fact that URL file-access is disabled on my server (due to obvious security issues involving remote file access)
Warning</b>: file_get_contents() [<a href='function.file-get-contents'>function.file-get-contents
</a>]: URL file-access is disabled in the server configuration in <b> \administrator\components
\com_joomunity\versionxml.php</b> on line <b>3</b><br />
The manual installation worked fine thou.
First impression is good – clean admin interface, the now almost standard sidebar with options and pleasant graphics.
User Management is quite simple – you can edit, block and send warnings to users..
The additional profile fields can ve added from “Social Profile Fields” - the interface is quite simple and clean. As an option you get Single line text, multi line text, date field, drop down list, radio input button.
We received an error when trying to edit the profile from frontpage (Call to a member function model_contact_view() on a non-object in D:\www\Joomla1.5\components\com_joomunity\applications\Profile\profile.php on line 90 ) Could be this error is fixed in a later version. I mention this just to have you attentive to the word “Beta” of this extension.
By default the Extension comes with several plugins : Comments, Friends, Minifeeds, Messages , Photos, Contacts and Articles.
A very nice feature is the templating system of the whole user interface. There is the need to be a little aware of PHP when you modify the templates.
As a bottom line – the Joomunity Extension is a good piece of software, but be aware of its bugs and keep an eye ofn its releases. It is very promising.
CBE – The German connection
Another new Community Extension comes from germany ( by Jan Möhrke) . At the first you have to find the english version of the site – then it’s all on it’s right way.
CBE takes the road of the well known “Community Builder” Extension. The Administrator can manage Users, Tabs, Fields, Lists.
Tab Management is quite similar to Community Builder. It has althou a quite ingenious twist: you can edit a condition in witch a certain tab is shown in the profile (sepparate conditions for my profile and for other users profile )
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Fields management goes also the “classic way” of Community Builder. You can choose from several field types, choose if the field is read-only, required …
Another interesting new feature is the possibility to filter certain usernames. For instance usernames that are insulting or misleading (root, admin, master…). This usernames will not be allowed upon registration.
The Extension has a lot of native integrations (Fireboard, Zoom media gallery, Guestbook) and some nice built in features like “GeoCoder” and “Geo User Map”
Bottom line to this Extension is – if you are looking for an extension that stays within the paradigm of Community Builder, but with some fresher ideas – this would be the choice. Also a great extension for german speaking users since they can have german native speaking support and language files.
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Joomla 
funny ? the first place i read about the little differences between CB
well... CB is doing quite well... if you do not make a multilingual