JomSocial vs. CB vs. Joomunity vs. Others

[prilly]

I do understand your frustration that there's not much available NOW. I've been waiting on some things. Some of which was originally promised 3 months ago, but now it appears may have been abandoned. So yes, those are the hazards of hanging out around Open Source and GPL.

Can't find quite what I'm looking for. Hoping the next thing will have it. But when the next thing finally comes along... that's not it, either.

I've been tempted to learn PHP for myself but I don't think I'd be good at it.

[Da3dalus]

Judging by the recent comments, not many fans of CB left nowadays? (At least I don't read many pro-s towards CB lately, though maybe I should consider huge CB fanbase as a given.) Everyone are looking towards the promiseland of Anahita.. A mystery not yet revealed, thus so tempting.

Let's ask ourselves this question instead: if you wanted/needed to create community website right now, would you use CB or JomSocial? Or you would still wait for completely fresh Anahita (supposedly released by the end of february) which will probably be in beta for quite a long time and which most likely will not come for free?

[slinky]

Let's ask ourselves this question instead: if you wanted/needed to create community website right now, would you use CB or JomSocial? Or you would still wait for completely fresh Anahita (supposedly released by the end of february) which will probably be in beta for quite a long time and which most likely will not come for free?

Neither - I'd stay away from Joomla entirely when decided to create a community-based website right now. Most add-ons are kludgy ways to rework framework never designed to handle this problem. The challenge I have with Anahita is exactly as you put it and an inability to even get an idea as to what they have in mind. By the time I'm going to hear from them or about the product, I'll have invested in something else, especially by the time it's useful. And what about the highly touted Joomla 1.6? All the changes being made?

As I said, Joomla for me works as a one way web site - you have lots of people entered into the system for purposes of back end administrating and simple individual uses. Other than a handful of serious components, the rest feel like awkward, half done and unintuitive hacks. I'm not criticizing for lack of effort as it's certainly there. It's just that Joomla doesn't seem to have the framework to do more than a decent CMS that you can raise quickly with some flash, fanfare and excellent permissions for authors/subscribers/viewers and excellent control over content placement.

For the moment, it's community builder with a major caveat. Every time I hear about a Joomla site with "thousands of members" it's nothing more than bare registrations and almost no activity. There is a reason for it. I love the product for what it is - a great CMS+ that allows quick production sites for sharing content with members and I hope that it will continue to develop.

[prilly]

Apparently Anahita will be GPL but it won't be free. I wish there was an indication of the price. With so many partners, I'm afraid it will end up like ebay: overpriced in order to satisfy investors.

Social networking is a big fad, possibly. When it comes down to it, my users prefer the forums by FAR. They don't even play around in the social app, they are not interested. I think social apps are for kids who don't actually have anything to say. It keeps them busy without having to be intelligent. Forums allow for real conversations. My users are not kids, they like to talk about things.

Joomla CMS allows me to dress up the forum so it's more interesting than a lot of boxes. Forums are so incredibly boring in their design, but so amazingly efficient in their function.

I'm setting up a new site now and need to make decisions. I might go with Kunena and a nice Gallery program such as Ignite Gallery... or PHPBB and use JFusion with it.

[slinky]

I agree that forums are where much of the action takes place. The challenge with Joomla is that it does a very poor job of basics, e.g. (a) profile creation, regardless of social interaction and (b) poor integration of components - they are 'integrated' into the wrap but the working of these components and with each other is usually not optimal, and (c) most of the components that will integrate into Joomla (like the add-ons in addition to forums) are usually second rate. This is why I use Joomla primarily as CMS and not for anything with social requirements - if I have forums, they are second to the forums and not the focal point of a site. In fact, I'll rarely use Joomla for such situations since you loose all the benefit of menu systems, etc. if you do. Framing using Joomla's wrap system is not an answer to me.

[prilly]

You must do a lot of your own site design. I don't know of any CMS that's better than Joomla. For all it's faults, at least it's something I can use and make it work without writing code. Actually, I don't think Joomla has many faults. It's just that I want to do certain things with the site and I can't because the extensions are lacking.

I can't find any Contest or Competition software. Actually, what I want is a more sophisticated Polls system that allows Photos to be added to the Poll questions (for a photo contest.) And, allow user uploads of photos. And allow users to add captions, that would be another kind of Poll. And, since users would be adding content (captions or photos), I'd like it to link to user profiles (CB, Jomsocial, Kunena, whatever.)

I'm actually very surprised there's nothing like this. It could be part of a photo gallery software, or it could be a sophisticated Polls and Voting application. There are various ways to approach it... but it does not exist. This kind of application, alone, can spark a site and attract users. There are lots of popular sites built around photo contest apps. I wonder why nobody at Joomla is inspired to do it. Especially since there's such an interest in social sites.

[slinky]

You must do a lot of your own site design. I don't know of any CMS that's better than Joomla. For all it's faults, at least it's something I can use and make it work without writing code. Actually, I don't think Joomla has many faults. It's just that I want to do certain things with the site and I can't because the extensions are lacking.

I agree - it's a very good CMS but it's not meant to extend to social networking, profile management and the numerous other extensions that are hacked in. I was disappointed that there still isn't at least better profile so that information about authors isn't there.

I can't find any Contest or Competition software... I'm actually very surprised there's nothing like this... I wonder why nobody at Joomla is inspired to do it. Especially since there's such an interest in social sites.

There are quizzes but this is specialty software and it's not something most sites will need and use. And I guess my point is furthered - it's a CMS and all the extras that are being attempted are sort of ratcheted into the CMS. I am far from the first here who suggested strongly that CB should have been made a part of the Joomla Core rather than yet another item to be added at some point. At this rate, the all important user profile will be core some time in the following decade and I'm wondering whether these components will be the hatchet solution for the indefinite future. Ah well, it is what it is and right now it still seems that CB is the only one that works. JomSocial doesn't have an admin demo I can see either.

[prilly]

Yes, it does seem that a comprehensive user profile should be a core part of Joomla. That would solve a lot of problems. It really would solve a ton of problems, I think.

I don't care for CB a whole lot. The way the tabs jump around every time the page refreshes... that's just not the way modern sites work. And if you add very many tabs it gets incredibly slow to reload. If I used CB I would keep the tabs to a bare minimum. Photos maybe, and that's about it.

[Beat]

Just a few quick complementing facts regarding informations given above, while busy preparing next CB and CBSubs releases:

- Community Builder 1.2.1 tabs don't jump around anymore. Actually, CB 1.2.1 rendering has been redesigned to be a fast "one shot - no redraws" provided you use latest CB-Team plugins and do not use javascript script tags within the body tag of your html of your site in your plugins or site modules, which itself breaks the parsing and triggers the rendering of the browser before all the page is loaded, providing the jittering you are speaking of. You can see that not being an issue e.g. on our demo sites, e.g. here: http://templates.joomlapolis.com/demo/c ... &Itemid=20

- I agree that CB with loads of third-party CB plugins and tabs can slow down, same as a joomla site with loads of plugins and modules too. So you need to be careful what you install. CB-Team Community Builder plugins like CB Profile Gallery and CB Profile Book (which also allows wall and user blog tabs) are designed and have been heavily optimized together with CB to be really fast and stable on loaded servers, one real-world case is running on a single dedicated server a 100'000 users site, with 5'000 users online same time at peak hours, all browsing CB profiles.

- regarding the issue of lack of "excellent permissions for authors/subscribers/viewers and excellent control over content placement" mentioned above, you may want to take a look at CBSubs at http://www.joomlapolis.com/ , a commercial subscription and access control CB plugin developed by CB Team (that's us), which has a full content/modules/access permissions and paid and free subscriptions system built-in. There are other joomla extension for each area (access and subscriptions), but I didn't see another one which has both access control and subscriptions cleanly integrated, without any hacking of joomla or CB.

- CB development is full steam ahead too, with CB 1.2.2 in the final tests, together with new CB plugins going very soon into tests, and new CB 2.0 which is in development too, and is addressing all the aging parts of CB 1.x with a clean modern rewrite, preparing for a serious uplift. So 2010 will be a great year on all sides, where the community is able to contribute in great new ways.

- Joomla 1.6 will allow adding additional fields for members quite easily too, and provide for fine-grained ACL. CB will of course be running on Joomla 1.6, once Joomla 1.6 stabilizes.

Btw very good discussion in here, lots of good ideas, contributions and feedbacks, really enjoying it.
Back to preparing new versions

[prilly]

The Coolness template certainly does modernize Community Builder. That is a true facelift for sure. Very impressive!

I noticed that Joomlapolis has a new template as well; looks very nice.

The Coolness demo mentions Groups: but I don't see Groupjive in the JED or anywhere. I heard somewhere that the Joomlapolis team had taken on the Groupjive project?

[FidelGonzales]

Thanks for the update Beat.

Scanning over the post, it's evident that Community Builder currently remains the only viable option. Many of the others lack a community to carry the project moving forward. This remains true of both commercial and non-commercial efforts. Many have ever been little more than vaporware.

I must admit, if I were to take a chance on any option at this very moment, there would be no other choice than Community Builder.

[Beat]

Thanks for the feedback on Coolness, cool that you like it

We're pretty proud of Coolness and of MyCommunity template on the technical side too, as they are still fastest and smallest download-size joomla templates across the board. E.g. MyCommunity is an all-CSS no-images template, and Coolness uses very few images, making the server location and ISP speed less important for page rendering speed. We felt that something giving focus to content was missing in the usual race for the most complex templates.

There is actually quite more to come on that templates front and user-interface this year, as look and feel is truly important, and has been a little bit neglected in the past years, in the hope/wish of leaving room to template developers. But now that we've done a few templates with Jacob and that we're involving template designers during development, things are changing fast.

Yes, indeed GroupJive has been taken over in full agreement with the GroupJive team, and the download is at our new Joomlapolis forge in GroupJive files. GroupJive has gone 1.8 RC now, and after months of intensive work, there is also a new rewritten version 2.0 which just debuted tests in our test-team.

So it's a great time to get involved for the community in testing, feedbacking and contributing to that area. If you want to check out GroupJive 1.8 RC, which is now simply a CB plugin, just download at forge (username/password: same as on main site http://www.joomlapolis.com ).

To take a look and give feedbacks and help forging GroupJive 2.0, PM Nick (nant) on joomlapolis, mentioning this thread, so that he can add you to relevant...work-...groups.

There will be also some cool new announcements in coming weeks and months as CB, CBSubs and CB Team CB plugins releases are picking up speed after months of full-time work on the core and on CB plugins.

At joomlapolis, we're pretty excited of 2010, with quite a few new year resolutions.

[slinky]

Thanks for the update Beat.

Scanning over the post, it's evident that Community Builder currently remains the only viable option. Many of the others lack a community to carry the project moving forward. This remains true of both commercial and non-commercial efforts. Many have ever been little more than vaporware. I must admit, if I were to take a chance on any option at this very moment, there would be no other choice than Community Builder.

EXTREMELY well put.

[Tribalix]

Somehow I could not install this module, all settings, all on the main page but can not show module

[Beat]

Somehow I could not install this module, all settings, all on the main page but can not show module

Hi Tribalix,
To avoid side-tracking this great discussion here into a support discussion, If you are speaking of the Community Builder component, best is to use our CB forum over at http://www.joomlapolis.com/ with details where we have a pretty active community support, and also actively supported on a daily basis by the CB team.

There is a CB FAQ section here and also a "help us help you" checklist of things to check/informations needed to gather so we that CB team or CB community at large can help fast and efficiently.

There is a README_INSTALLATION.txt file in the package, and also a free CB installation guide available there too, which is the around first 30 pages of the full CB documentation (available to documentation subscribers). If anything is unclear, please open a new thread over at joomlapolis, we are steadily improving our documentation, so suggestions and contributions are warmly welcome.

[coolex]

When Anahita is released to the public at the end of February (according to the roadmap)...

I couldn't find this information. Can you post a link?

[prilly]

The roadmap has changed since I posted that. It's now the end of March. The Anahita website is at: http://www.anahitapolis.com/

The Roadmap is on the menu, right side.

[FidelGonzales]

I spent an hour tooling around with Community Builder. It would work well. I was surprised on how much cleaner it looked in previous years and liked some of the plugins that were available, which also worked quite well.

But upon modifying it and digging through additional plugins and forum posts, I found that it appears to still not play well with Virtuemart, which is a major no-go for many of my operations, as from experience in running some very large editorial and/or community websites, relying strictly on advertising simply does not work, which is why integrated e-commerce is the way to go for making a living and actually generating some return on investment for all the hours put into a site.

I toyed with it briefly and found some apparent issues but would rather not move forward with it until a future release, perhaps with an auto-syncronization tool in place. Thanks.

[Beat]

I spent an hour tooling around with Community Builder. It would work well. I was surprised on how much cleaner it looked in previous years and liked some of the plugins that were available, which also worked quite well.

But upon modifying it and digging through additional plugins and forum posts, I found that it appears to still not play well with Virtuemart, which is a major no-go for many of my operations, as from experience in running some very large editorial and/or community websites, relying strictly on advertising simply does not work, which is why integrated e-commerce is the way to go for making a living and actually generating some return on investment for all the hours put into a site.

I toyed with it briefly and found some apparent issues but would rather not move forward with it until a future release, perhaps with an auto-syncronization tool in place. Thanks.

FidelGonzales,
Thanks for the great feedbacks on CB.

Re Virtuemart integration with Community Builder, I have some good news for you:

As this Virtuemart-CB issue remained unadressed for years, Kyle, aka krileon, our newest CB Team member, has been addressing this non-trivial synchronization with Virtuemart during his free time, and has released a CB plugin to synchronize VirtueMart with Community Builder profiles: at this time, it's an open-source "clubware" from Kyle that is in beta, called AMS VirtueMart that is available here.

CB Team also developed an integration between CBSubs and Virtuemart (scroll down for the Virtuemart integration description) among its CBSubs integration plugins, available together with CBSubs. This integration plugin does also the CB-VirtueMart synchronization, same as Kyle's plugin, and allows also site members to be assigned to specific Virtuemart groups depending on their current CBSubs membership(s). This allows to provide special pricing, or seller status based on membersip level.

Again, to not sidetrack this great discussion, if you have questions or need information on any of these, please check/ask on Kyle's CB plugin for Virtuemart forum for the CB solution or on our CBSubs Forum at joomlapolis for the CBSubs integration pugin. Both forums are answered on a daily basis.

[FidelGonzales]

Beat,

Outstanding news. Thanks for sharing. This will help considerably as we move forward.

[unleash_it]

hi there

The roadmap has changed since I posted that. It's now the end of March. The Anahita website is at: http://www.anahitapolis.com/
The Roadmap is on the menu, right side.

thx alot - i have talked to the developers. They will release very very soon. They want to make a great release.

joo

[Webdongle]

The roadmap has changed since I posted that. It's now the end of March. The Anahita website is at: http://www.anahitapolis.com/
...

So in January it was next month then next month came and it is now next month.

mmmmmmmmmmm sounds like the old saying "Tomorrow never comes"

[prilly]

Oh, it's not that bad. They were 1 month off. That's a whole lot better than most PHP softwares I've worked with in the past 2 years, including commercial projects that have a good reputation. In fact, only ONE month off the estimated delivery date is pretty darn good. I've been around software development, software sales, database design since the 1980's -- and a delay of only one month deserves a reward!!

[prilly]

In fact, I was waiting for a software program that the developer said would be released 3 months ago. Then he stopped visiting the support forum, doesn't say when or if it will ever be finished. Even if he finally did release it, now, I know that another project of his is more important to him so I don't know that I want to buy a product that has very poor communication. I'm afraid that support, bugfixes,and ongoing development might be just as poor. I'm looking elsewhere. At this point, the COMMUNICATION is the biggest issue with me.

Anahita is very good at communicating; they keep up their Roadmap. Which is an excellent idea, I wish other developers were more committed to using a roadmap. For one thing, it probably saves the developers a lot of time answering zillions of emails from people who want such information.

I don't know that I will use Anahita; but I do admire how they run their website. It's very professional. Which gives a good impression of the softwares, too.

[prilly]

I'm using JomSocial on one site but not sure if I want to pay the license for another year.

I'm setting up another site and very interested in using Joomla, CB, Kunena and UddeIM for messages. These programs work together well and form a good solid social site. The upgrades that Beat mentioned convince me that CB is still an excellent option. And I'm impressed with their renewed enthusiasm for the coming year. Energy and activity is a good sign.

The Coolness template is what got me hooked. It's modern, clean, and very smooth. JWallpapers is adding some more features to their brand new Photo Contest module. And they have a CB integration too.

So maybe I can finally do what I've wanted to do with Joomla for the past year. As Slinky mentioned, my user base is not over 4 digits so using Joomla for a social site shouldn't be a problem. In fact, my current "active" user base is about 2 digits, but I've run some very busy social sites in the past and I'd like to do it again.

[unleash_it]

hello prilly

many many thanks for sharing your ideas - and experience. We are very very happy to hear such great experience.

Love to continue the talk to you

best regards
Joo_jesus

[Astrophel]

To get back to FidelGonzalez's suggestion...

jSocialSuite Beta was released today. Development on this is ongoing, many features are to be added regularly.

Release announcement on jVitals.com

Demo Site is jSocialSuite.com

and of course the developers are always available on The jVitals Support Forum please do not use the forum on the demo site for support. It's certainly worth checking out to see if this is a solution for you, if there are things you need the developers are always very responsive.

Hope this helps

[FidelGonzales]

Cannot complain about the support. It has always been above the rest.

I like some of the functionality. But that design is a bit clunky and reminds me of MySpace.

[prilly]

None of the menus would work for me. I'd click on stuff and nothing happened. Except I did get various templates. They were pretty.

[Astrophel]

Thanks for trying.

This probably means you did not notice the Accept Terms button (just a little under the menu). Also Note that once that is done, you can hover over App title bars to configure them.

I did the same thing, will mention it to the devs.