This addon is 100% gold. I've used it on a couple of web sites now. Very easy to use, fast easy to find support and looks great. Lots of other extensions (addons) are designed to work with it and do!

I was a bit concerned with no documentation to speak of, however, it is a beautiful thing when something runs so smoothly you dont need it. A+ extention, very powerful, and it just works.

Sounds like a great idea, but comes with practically no documentation. Good luck getting it going.

This is really a great component. It adds much needed functionality to Joomla sites, but there are certainly some pretty major and obvious drawbacks.

The pace of development CB has is not good. Its been near enough 6 months since it was released, 11k+ members on their site and not any significant updates in this time. There are little to no "official" Plugins/Addons released by CB, most of which are 3rd party and only 1 of these has been "officially" certified by CB ( Which makes me feel very safe when I install them! ). There is an update coming shortly, but as far as I can tell its mainly a stability release.

The support for CB is poor. Check out Joomlapolis and note that many of the threads go unanswered by any official CB staff. I can appreciate that they run a "paid" support service, which gives you access to the Community Builder Manual...but a massive amount of questions go simply ignored on their forums (I have started numerous threads myself and they have gone ignored). It seems the more "technical" the question the quicker its answered...Simple things get overlooked and get passed by.

You will lose quite alot of "choice" you have for components and modules when you install CB. Many Modules don't work with it...Numerous Components and Bridges the same. This is to be expected of course, but I didn't quite realise how much "choice" I would lose when I installed this.

Anyway, it IS a good component...But honestly, if you have a genuinely large Joomla community and are somebody who needs to develop at a good pace "with" your Community, I'd think carefully before installing this.

Want to integrate Joomla with standalone phpBB - I reckon installing community builder and using the phpBB plugin for community builder is the easiest & nicest way to do it! What is really nice is the facility to easily get the databases synchronised if you are already starting with a populated phpBB forum

I love this component! This is the hardcore component for my alumni-site. And there'a an active community for this component as well, so lot of help available. There are still some whishes, but these are of minor concerns. I've all the trust it will be come better by every new release.

Community builder is super. It nicely links together content contributed by site users and makes it easy to organize and view this content. It is easy to install, easy to learn. I use for a non-profit organization website and it works great on our to keep track of articles and blogs submitted by users in each department. We really enjoy being able to click on a person's profile and see what they have blogged, uploaded to the gallery, articles contributed and more! Cool.

CB ist really great and there are a lot of Joomla-Extension that work together with CB. But it is difficult to find them all.

The component calls back home when working in the admin backend.
According to developers to announce security updates. An opt-in tick-box would be appreciated.

This component acts as the glue between so many other components, allowing you to create a site with sense of community, where members can share about themselves and interact with others.

I highly recommend this component for anyone wanting to modify the registration process, manage a community of users, or provide/collect more detailed user profiles.

Their plugin system also allows the easy creation of plugins which can react to events from the CB core (such as login, logout, register, etc.)

Community Builder is a mature extension for expanding and customizing user profiles in Joomla. CB gives the administrator numerous options to include custom-defined fields for registered users. During registration you are given the option to volunteer/force completion of any field you define. Would you like to collect a secondary email? How about requesting what city or country a user resides in? Would you like it if your members had a custom text box to explain a bit more about themselves? All of these features can be implemented in the powerful, but easy-to-use, back end.

In addition to the custom fields you can define for registration you can opt to leave additional information that can be filled out at a later time. Perhaps you don't want to make your members wait five minutes to enter in data. Have them come back and enter non-vital information like a personal website URL via their profile page when they feel like it. Also supported is an option to upload a personal image or select an avatar from an admin-defined gallery. Standard features also include a private messaging system, custom registration email messages, a buddy system called 'connections', integration with some forum packages, skin support, gallery functionality, blogging and abuse reporting.

Last but not least Community Builder has a very active 3rd party developer scene. The 'Joomlapolitan citizens' have contributed almost twenty language packs available for download. Additionally, there are another twenty-plus plugins altering different types of CB functionality. They range from plotting points on Google Maps to event planners to conditional field selection to--well--you get the point. One plugin alone gives you the option to ping popular instant messaging programs to see if a user is online. Supported platforms include Yahoo, MSN, Jabber, AIM and ICQ. Development for Skype is also in the works. Here's a short list of my favorite plugins for Community Builder.

Must-Have Plugins Include:

CB Author bot --- This handy fellow permits you to link author names to CB Profiles. This is great if you run a news website where you'd like your visitors to be able to view biographies of your staff.

Sample Article: http://myjoomlahost.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2&Itemid=1

Click on the name in bold, it will take you to this page:

http://myjoomlahost.com/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=62

Notice the articles published by this user feature? This is extremely helpful if you have a staff writer that publishes only specific content, or you wish to pull up a recent editorial by a specific user.

jAwards CB-Plugin

jAwards allows you to distribute special accomplishments to your community members for their contributions to your site. These medals are displayed in CB profiles and in Simple Board forum posts as well. A good way to build friendly community spirit.

Sample Profile: http://www.roundtable-bretonnia.org/index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=64

In Summary:

Community Builder has been constantly one of the most active and downloaded projects for the Joomla Open Source project. This is no coincidence. CB is a power, easy-to-use profile editor that really adds distinctive flavor to your site that is otherwise lacking in the Joomla core distribution. Joomla has limited user-defined account settings and parameters, however this extension takes all of the base components and injects them with steroids. Make no mistake, this is one of the most consistently great 3rd party add-ons for the CMS. Fantastic interface, deep customization and a friendly support community make Community Builder an essential addition to any Joomla site. 5 out of 5 stars.

Paul

The power of communities just became more powerful!

Thanks