Community Builder¶
History¶
The Community Builder (CB) project was founded during the early Mambo days as a suite of components and modules that cleanly (no core hacking) extended the CMS functionality permitting the establishment of a basic community within the boundaries of the CMS. During the 7 years of its existence (perhaps the oldest and most mature Joomla extension), CB has maintained its Mambo compatibility (respecting its own established community) and has evolved to support both flavors of Joomla (1.0 and 1.5) natively with the same code base. At the same time, always maintaining its GPL and free status, CB has established a framework and API that supports and encourages further expansion and integration with other Joomla extensions. There are over 150 extensions on the Joomla Extensions Directory alone that make CB the most expendable Joomla component. A number of CB plugins have also been released by the CB Team itself. CB has been since its Mambo days and continues to be the most popular extension in the Joomla environment today. With over 300.000 registered members the Joomlapolis site (home of Community Builder), is one of the largest online Joomla communities. The CB suite is one of the most stable robust systems currently available for Joomla – and it’s free.
All of the above have been possible because of our huge community, our test team, our translators, our forum moderators and our documentation subscribers and financial supporters (donations). The CB Team has released its first commercial Mambo/Joomla CMS – CB template combination called MyCommunity and has also released its commercial CBSUBS (Community Builder Subscriptions System), a set of plugins that takes your CB powered Joomla site to the next level enabling subscription based services.
High level Overview¶
The Community Builder suite is in essence a set of extensions (component, modules, plugins) that enhance and add new functionality to the underlining supported CMS (Joomla, Mambo). This suite adds user profile functionality to your CMS membership site. CB gives each user a profile that contains CB fields placed on CB tabs. The user profile is highly customizable with the creation of many CB fields (and CB Tabs).
In addition to user profile functionality, CB extends the CMS registration process enabling a number of different approval workflow processes.
CB has a built-in connection feature that permit users to connect to each other.
CB also has a User List functionality, where admins can specify user lists to be generated in front-end. User lists may also be search-able, making it easy for members to locate other member of similar interests and connect to them.
Documentation¶