Flash and Joomla News by Eyezberg

Building a Community focused Joomla site 

Joomla's mission is to manage your content, mainly articles, media, users.

User management is very limited in the core CMS. One image and just a few details is all you can have here.

If you want to build a user-focused website, a real online community where members can interact with each other and make the site come alive, you'll have to add a few features with extensions. 

The centerpiece of your new website will be one of the best components for the CMS, what makes it even cooler is that it's free:  

  Community Builder

This very extensive component has many advantages (JACL+ OK):

• it is one of the most actively maintained and widely used extensions, so critical issues get fixed asap and new features are actively developped
• it has its own plug-in framework API architecture, allowing coders to extend its functionality even more with additional "tabs" on user profiles (such as image galleries, points, blog post..)
• it is so well-known and used that the devs have now an active collaboration with many other extension developers. These components can thus interact and work together to create an even better user experience.
• you can add your very own custom fields to user profiles, so that it can be adapted to any website type
  
• it is well-coded and fast, has active support forums and very nice documentation!
• it's language files allow you to set up international communities
  

Now, what is the lovingly called "CB" good for?

• replace the normal registration and login process with a proprietary one which allows requiering terms and conditions approval, email (and admin) confirmation / activation / approval, and addition of additional, public or private, requiered or optional, user details.
• each user has his/her own extensive profile page, where different information is grouped into tabs: articles contributed, forum posts, image gallery, user friends/links (connections), blog entries, and any other tabs you want to create
  
• extensive moderation (user aproval, user image aproval, requiered and or non changeable informations..) with dedicated admin module
• Twelve field types supported: checkbox, date, dropdown, email address, editor text area, text area, text, radio, web address, multi-select checkbox, multi-select dropdown and delimiter; and all can use language variables!

Profile page example:

On these profile tabs, you can notice for example the Zoom gallery tab, or the Forum tab. These are providing data from CB plugins or other components right there in your CB profile, such as your gallery images or your forum posts (with clickable link). You can add

plugins (native to CB) and their tabs for:

• the CB Profile gallery (images with admin-configurable quota)
• OnStat for your Instant Messengers online status (MSN, ICQ, AIM..)
  
• ...

3rd party standalone component integration!

This allows you to have CB working with any or all of the following:

• a forum: Joomlaboard: share and reciprocal link of profile informations (avatar etc), link to users posts..
• newsletter: YANC, which can be integrated into sign-up workflow
• various galleries such as Gallery...
  
• Account Expiration (AEC),
• custom user groups (GroupJive)
• custom access rights (JACL+)
  
• instant messaging (JIM, Missus, uddeIM ..) and others!

• Newsletter integration with YaNC

  YaNC allows you to create several newsletters in HTML or text format. (Yet another Newsletter Component) integration starts right at user signup: you can provide a checkbox at registration for your new members to automatically recieve the site news by email. Later on, they will be able to change their settings (subscriptions) from a dedicated tab.
  Features: separate templates per mailing, archieves, process indicator, attachments, multilingual, images embedded or linked, view and click statistics..

• Forums integration with JoomlaBoard (version 1.1.3 JACL+ OK)

  JoomlaBoard is a simple forum with one main advantage: it has been specifically created for Joomla! as an integrated component! It may lack more advanced features you know from dedicated forum scripts such as vBulletin or SMF, but works nicely on smaller websites. It is easy to set up, administer, and the integration with CB is really nice, as the dev's of both components have collaborated on this:
• dedicated tabs with linked posts and forum settings
• shared avatar and login
• forum can be used with a dedicated mambot to comment on content items

• Private Messaging with Missus
  

  (please note here that Missus is just one of the various integrated PM solutions out there, you might also want to check out JIM or myPM or uddeIM (JACL+ OK) etc..!)
  Missus is a very nice private messaging system, with some AJAX thrown in for good mesure. With Missus your users can communicate through private messages and also send files attached to it. Users can be notified by mail about new PMs and admin their inbox, sent and trash, save drafts, manage their own contact lists and configuration. Also messages can be exported as PDF, HTML or TXT, forwarded by mail or printed.
  As an admin you can configure the way messages flow between users, such as allow or not reply, forward and broadcast of messages, the number of attached files (or just disable it) and allow not registered users to send PMs. You can also purge messages and files to clear database and server space.

• Gallery integration with Zoom (version 2.5.1 RC2 JACL+ OK)
  

  Zoom has many professional features, is very actively developed, and well integrated. zOOm Media Gallery is a gallery system that can store images (photos), video files (all streaming formats supported), audio files (with mp3 playback) and documents (Word and PDF files).
  Features are too many to list here, have a read on the zoomfactory website.
  You can have a dedicated zOOm tab on your user profiles!

• Custom Usergroup creation with GroupJive

  GroupJive is a little-known component which allows your users to create their own usergroups other members can become members of. I have only test-installed it and pocked around a it: everything seemed to work in a simple and easy way. Features are open/private groups, groupimages, bulletin board, memberlist etc (existing or yet to come).

• Account Expiration Control with AEC (JACL+ OK)

  AEC lets you offer paid memberships on your Joomla! website. It supports several major payment gateways. You can have multiple payment plans (Paid, Free, Lifetime, Trials, Global free trials). Very nice component, if you use it on your site, consider contributing to its development!

• Access Control with JACL+

  JACL+ (Joomla Access Control Lists Plus) has been mentionned here previously in the access control article. It is a very nice core hack (means: backup before usage and only usable with the Joomla! version it's codded for!)
  This component will enable you to create new user groups and/or new access levels. Besides these, it also enables you to assign multiple access levels to a group to make your contents' access more controllable. With the combination of user groups and access levels, you will be able to create complicated Access Control while you can also maintain the original access control if you wish.
  As in order to allow both Joomla! and third party extensions to benefit from these custom groups you have to replace some files, it is best if you need this feature to become a chartered member on their site to get early access to all updates; you can though download the component and the modified components fro free!