Joomla and Social Networking

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!

Exciting times indeed for Joomla and social networking.

Let's not forget http://www.joomunity.org/ as well. :)

And another community extension which recently released a beta version: http://joomunity.org

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.

http://www.rmdstudio.com/socia...pment.html

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.

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.

I was wondering why KickApps 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.

Well I just launched KickDeveloper on Halloween. A very appropriate date too. Still working out some kinks, but there is a lot of cool stuff being worked on.

Joomla benefits from a huge development and user community making it the most versatile platform for building scalable websites. A social network is a social structure made of nodes which are generally individuals or organizations. It indicates the ways in which they are connected through various social familiarities ranging from casual acquaintance to close familial bonds.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.
--------------------------------
Gillberk

OPINION LEADER

Seems like social networking being a part of your site is becoming a must