I’ve been tasked with creating a social website for a group of people, several of whom are on Facebook and other social sites. When I was first enlisted in creating them a website, they needed some place to communicate about general topics and upcoming gatherings. So I set them up with a forum. Over the past couple of years their needs and desires for their site have grown. Fortunately in that time I found Joomla! and even more recently I’ve found Community Builder.
Community Builder is a social networking extension for Joomla!.It includes the ability to have your own profile and connect with people, and to put those people in groups (a la Facebook and other social sites). It has it’s own login module and it’s own who’s online module that tells you who is online not just the number of users and guests.
To download the software you’ll need to go to the Joomlapolis website and register. The main product is free. There are templates, and some other enhancements that are offered for purchase as well as other web type services. As of this initial posting the stable version of Community Builder is 1.2.1.
The download is simple. All the core components and modules come in a zip file. You will need to extract the zip file to install. In the zip file are four more zip files – these are the components and modules – as well as some text files with instructions for a new install or an upgrade.
While I did have Community Builder 1.2.0 installed and I could have used the upgrade instructions, I chose not to. I am testing the software on a site that has no users so I was able to uninstall 1.2.0 and use the new install instructions for 1.2.1.
Read the installation instructions as there is a recommended order of installation for the components and modules. This might be a required order of installation if you want it to work. I don’t know, I followed the instructions.
Once installed you will need to go to the module manager to enable the CBLogin module as well as the Communitly Builder Who’s online module and workflow module.
You’ll also want to go to Community Builder under components and set things up under user management, at least. There are additional items for configuration such as for the tabs, and how to handle connections. If you want to have private messaging and blogging available. The big thing is to remember to enable or publish the feature you just finished configuring. I missed this a couple of times. After setting something up I went to the front end and refreshed only to see no changes.
Something else to keep in mind. My site is set up with articles open to everyone and the added functionality only available to registered users, therefore, other than the login and who’s online modules, changes aren’t visible unless you log into the site. The cool social stuff doesn’t show up until you go into ‘your profile’. The your profile section is different from your details, too.
In addition to the components available from the team at Joomlapolis there are extensions available from other sources that expand the functionality of Joomla! and Community Builder even more. I will be adding a forum to this site and would like a little finer control over user access. I will also be looking into a way to accept donations as well as integrate an online community store.
Community Builder is easy enough to install on a Joomla! site. Configuration options are fairly extensive so you will want to take some time here. Expandability appears to be pretty good at this time.
You’ll likely be reading more about this as I find and add options and tools.
Originally published at: suguayproductions.com/joomla which has been discontinued.
