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

As nathandiehl mentioned above, this is very clean editor in terms of code output. No WYSIWG editor is going to be as good as a master programmer typing it all out by hand, but this is about as close as you're going to get. That alone is worth five stars after seeing some of the horrific code spewed out by some of the other editor mambots.

While the code is clean, JoomlaFCK is still lacking in a few areas. First, the only options to customize the toolbar buttons are a 'basic', 'compact' and 'advanced'. These provide more or less buttons as stated, but the lack of individual control is frustrating. Thankfully, the editor loads quickly even with the 'advanced' setting.

JoomlaFCK is a quality editor that has some appealing features. Above all else, it has the cleanest code output I've seen in Joomla editor. Secondly, it supports skining to match your site template. Last but not least, it is fast and stable. There is an occasional resizing issue or two, but for the most part it works as intended.

It is worth noting that JoomlaFCK doesn't really have much in the way of administrative customization. It is not overly easy to define sytles, headings or the like. MOSce editor beats JoomlaFCK in this respect. None the less, FCK is an editor you should try and keep and eye out for. Hopefully with time a little extra polish will make this mambot an all-star.

4 out of 5 stars.

Paul

MyCheckin is a simple manager for checked out items. It lists which component, user and timestamps checked out each item. Checking in items is simply a one-click process. There is no version history or revert feature, nor are the item externally linked. (Clickable to preview the current state of the checked out item).

MyCheckin is a lightweight component that serves basic check-in needs, but doesn't offer much in the way of advanced tracking or content previews. It does a simple job if you're not demanding much, but power users may wish to wait for subsequent releases or another component.

4 out of 5 Stars*

(Reviewed with the 'lite' user in mind)

joomlaXplorer is an extremely handy tool if you don't have access to ftp or a file manager like cpanel. Once I accidentally deleted a template file but couldn't remove the directory because it was assigned to "nobody".

I couldn't remove the folder via ftp or cpanel file manager, but joomlaxplorer came to the rescue and was able to delete it anyways.

My only criticism is regarding the interface. The icons for managing files and directories are without any text unless you roll your mouse over the actual link. You have to guess a bit until you learn which icons do what.

An option to show or hide text/icons would be very handy. None the less, this small complaint does not outweigh the handiness of this extension's great built-in browser. 4 out of 5 stars.