Home / General CMS Issues / Joomla and Social Networking 
General CMS Issues
Nov
03
2008
Joomla and Social Networking

Congratulations to Drupal which won both of Packt Publishing Open Source CMS awards this year. Drupal also won last year and Joomla won in 2006. What interested me wasn't really the decison but the explanation:

"Comments were also reserved for Drupal’s strong social applications capabilities and how it integrates seamlessly with content management."

Much as I love Joomla, I agree. Its true to say that Drupal currently offers more social networking power than Joomla. It has high-quality groups, profile, tagging and ACL features. Its also being used for higher-profile social networking projects, as Acquia show here:


Can the Joomla Community Catch Up?

I'm glad you asked. Yes, it can. Here are the two most likely projects to suceeed:

Open Source: Community Builder and GroupJive

GroupJive is one of those promising projects that never managed to get around the Open Source Wall. It faded away and has been revived several times. Now its finally joined forces with perhaps the most successful of all Joomla extensions: Community Builder. With Uddeim (Joomla's best private messaging system) already working closely with CB, lets hope the projects can grow together into something more powerful than they are separately.

Commercial: Azrul's JomSocial

Now this is bad (meaning good, not bad meaning bad). Azrul has developed two good extensions in Jomcomment and MyBlog, but his latest project looks like its going to be an enormous leap forward. JomSocial offers groups, profile, private messaging, tagging and a whole lot more. Its commercial, but its one of the most exciting projects I've seen in months. Its hugely ambitious but he has a demo site that you can play with and its working well. Head over and test with it now. You'll be impressed.

 

 

Comments  

 
#1 mathias 2008-11-03 18:07
You're forgetting one very promising extension: anahita from http://www.rmdstudio.com/
There's very little info available at the moment, but I hear they're working on a new site. From what I've seen so far it will blow drupal out of the water: imagine joomla's ease of use + a framework to build your own facebook/myspace/...
2009 is going to be the year of the social joomla!
Quote
 
 
#2 Steve Burge 2008-11-03 18:22
Thanks Mathias - have they written anything publicly about their project?
Quote
 
 
#3 Mark.Simpson 2008-11-03 18:31
Exciting times indeed for Joomla and social networking.

Let's not forget http://www.joomunity.org/ as well. :-)
Quote
 
 
#4 Sander 2008-11-03 18:46
And another community extension which recently released a beta version: joomunity.org
Quote
 
 
#5 Rob Clayburn 2008-11-03 19:49
Couldn't agree more that the social side of things for Joomla is a bit weak. The Jomsocial site looks pretty sweet
Theres also http://www.joomunity.org/ which whilst rather confusing to install seems to be pretty neat.

However, whist all of the current components are great what I think is missing is interpolity of your data across sites. There's loads of open initiatives taking place across the web to ensure that you as a site user own your own social graph (FOAF, OAuth, OpenID, Yadis, Open Social etc), which none of these components to my knowlege are making user of.

Lets be honest not all Joomla sites are going to have massive communities, but what if your site could instantly connect with user info from other sites (once authenticated of course) - suddenly the number of sign ups to achieve 'critical mass' decreases dramatically.

Imagine the day when you can sign up on your Joomla site which authenticates with your LinkedIn, AOL, Yahoo accounts and once its confirmed who you are you can grab your friend profiles from those sites, grab your images from Flicker and post stuff back to those sites.

I've been messing around with google Open Social and shindig (the apache OS open social container) and I'm beginning to think that distributed social networks are cetainly possible and will be an amazing boon for anyone wanting to create communities. I don't really have any installable code at the moment and havent started looking at the oAuth stuff but I have successfully implemented the gadget container part of the spec, so you can install any google gadget to run in your profile.
Quote
 
 
#6 mathias 2008-11-04 06:42
http://www.rmdstudio.com/social-media/social-network-management-system-development.html
Quote
 
 
#7 Steve Burge 2008-11-04 06:59
Thanks Rob - you might be on the right lines there. I see a lot of Joomla sites already using social networking tools like Disqus for comments. From my SEO point of view, Google is increasingly taking community data into account:



Thanks Mathias - that post looks like a manifesto of what they might build.

BTW, I forgot Kickapps: http://www.alledia.com/blog/joomla-news/kickapps-integrating-community-features-with-joomla/
Quote
 
 
#8 Stephen Moseley 2008-11-04 12:10
Steve Good points on the social aspects of Joomla.

Something I will point out from my recent experience...

Community Builder has a lot of value, especially as a platform with all the plugins, but if you want to change anything (such as html and javascript files) you have to hack files. This isn't TOO new as most Joomla components DON'T use MVC. But Community Builder is even worse. The same functions used on the front end are used in the backend.

So, if you have jquery already loaded in your template and don't want it loaded twice, you have to hack a core file that loades jquery in the backend as well.

I fixed it, but the simple fact is that you shouldn't have to do this. CB in my mind is a poster child of why to code in an MVC format. They need to check out JReviews - VERY VERY well done commerical component. Some of it is encoded but almost all of it is changeable by template.

What's my point? Well, the fact that you can't change things makes it really hard for custom work. I'm considering not using Joomla for larger projects as the quality of some of the more established components aren't great.

Hopefully some of the newer extensions will improve on this and make Joomla a better option.
Quote
 
 
#9 Makis Mourelatos 2008-11-04 12:20
I d love to see a prsentation of
http://www.joomunity.org/

i believe it has some great possibilities to replace Community Builder over time.
Quote
 
 
#10 Mitch Pirtle 2008-11-04 13:02
I was wondering why KickApps (www.kickapps.com/) wasn't mentioned ;-)

I like the idea of both hosted and non-hosted options, as some communities certainly have different requirements than others. I love RubberDoc from rmdstudio, and looking forward to seeing more from them.
Quote
 

Add comment


Security code
Refresh