Community Builder 
- Yes
- This extension has additional addons listed in an extension specific category.
- This extension requires registration to download.
For over 9 years now the 490,000 and growing Joomlapolis members have made CB the most widely used (over 2,500,000 public installs per Google) social networking solution. It’s FREE and has always been GPL.
Social websites go far beyond Facebook look-alikes and CB has literally hundreds of built-in features and extra (free or commercial) add-ons from CB Team and other parties that will help you realize your very own - tailored to your specific needs - website.
CB also has a powerful built-in framework (CB API doc. is available on Joomlapolis) so it can be extended and enhanced.
There are hundreds of built-in features you can use to:
+ Create profiles for your members
+ Identify users with first/middle/last name fields
+ Add avatar photos to profiles
+ Add unlimited CB fields to your profiles (text, image, textarea, html editor, integer, checkbox, multi-select checkbox, drop-down, multi-select drop-down, radio, date, email, weblinks - more available with add-ons)
+ Use delimiter fields to put customized HTML code in profiles
+ Configure fields to be read-only, for profile viewing, displayed with title, to appear on registration form, etc
+ Control of core fields (email, username, etc), and ajax email and username checkers
+ Custom field validations
+ Organize fields in tabs that can be displayed in different built-in profile positions
+ Create extended registration form
+ Allow login using email address and password
+ Manage registration and profile image approval in frontend with CB Workflow module
+ Create unlimited CB User lists with powerful searching
+ Let members connect with each other (mutual consent or one way)
+ Display # of connections on profiles
+ Show connection path between profile viewer and owner up to 6th degree
+ Moderate your community with FE reporting, banning,
+ Let members interact (using email or PMS extension)
+ Built-in integration with Joomla articles (show article links in author profiles)
+ Built-in integration with Kunena forum
+ Use built-in integration with uddeIM messaging
Each CB distribution has:
+ component (universal for all J! versions and Mambo)
+ CB Login, Workflow and Online mods (also universal)
+ 43 page Install guide
+ Readme and Upgrade txt files
Joomlapolis hosts free community driven support forums.
Optionally, Advanced, Professional or Developer 12-months memberships can be purchased giving rights to priority or even same/next business day guaranteed forum support and access to many additional optional plugins and privileges.
PHP 5.0-5.4.x and MySQL 4.1+ database are prerequisites.
* Please do not use the reviews to post support issues. Use our free community forums or paid support system at https://www.joomlapolis.com/support for that, so that we can help you if needed. *.
Unintuitive, unstable extension brought down my entire site with ~1000 unique visitors per day. I ended up deleting it completely and killed all the files from the root of web site just to make sure nothing is left.
Hi karakatiza,
Welcome to JED reviews as this is your very first and only "review" and visible down-voting since "being around Joomla for 4 years" as you state.
We are sorry to have to reply to address the diverse incorrect statements you made:
1) Are you sure that you downloaded Community Builder 1.4 from the official site http://www.joomlapolis.com/ ? Even free, CB 1.4 is written cleanly and professionally for most parts using an extensible OOD approach, and has an excellent track record with no known vulnerabilities for years now. So not corresponding at all to your description made above.
2) we're also very surprised by your "terrible" experience, since none of the 406,614 CB community members that have downloaded at least one Community Builder official release so far did report such issues or experiences due to CB on our forums nor on http://forum.joomla.org/ to date.
3) To the contrary of what you write here, uninstalling CB is as easy as any other extension: simply uninstall through joomla extensions installer, done.
4) Finally, we need to notice that we don't see your username registered anywhere else (not on http://forum.Joomla.org/ and not on the official CB site http://www.Joomlapolis.com/ either, which is very surprising for someone "being around Joomla for 4 years").
You are welcome to download latest CB version for free on our site and to use our free support forums at http://www.joomlapolis.com/forum if you have any question or CB-related issue.
Hi JestaCheeko,
Welcome to JED reviews as this is your very first and only review (and visible down-voting) in last months. Here are our replies to your complaints:
1) CB is a free, complete, component (and not a plugin as you write) that has a lot of features included, described above, and which are sufficient for most sites. Then it has many free and commercial CB plugins from CB Team and many third-parties allowing to extend its functions depending on specific needs. Your complaint towards a large, rich and free component is of the same level as getting Joomla for free, and then complaining that you have to pay for commercial extensions from core joomla or third party developers for getting specific functionalities that core joomla doesn't have because not all sites need those.
2) To the contrary of what you write here, uninstalling CB is as easy as any other extension: simply uninstall component and modules you installed through joomla extensions installer in the standard way, done.
3) After careful review, we suspect that your review and down-voting has been made specifically as a disappointed reaction when you discovered in reply to your first and only forum.Joomla.org post that the terms of the GPL do not allow you to remove copyrights on any GPL extension nor on Joomla itself without the authors prior permission (and that, to the contrary of many extensions, this is a permission that we are happy to give for the frontend output personally to any contributing or modestly supporting member of our community).
You are welcome to contact us on our support forums at http://www.joomlapolis.com/forum should you have any question or issue, as this is not a place for support.
We have switched all of our social networks back to Community Builder after two long years of frustrations.
We're sorry we ever left they truly embrace the heart of the Joomla Community.
Keep up the great work.
In short: Don't think twice. I have never tried another extension to Joomla such as JoomSocial, I'm sure it's fine. I can only tell you that you will be in heaven using this one.
Why?
1. It's user friendly
2. It's powerful beyond your wildest dreams
3. Everything you will think "Ah.. I wish it had this or that", it's probably there or they created an extension for.
4. They keep developing extensions for it and they are pretty cheap.
5. Using their support is just ridiculously enjoyable. YOU WILL GET ANSWERED and by very capable programmers. Indeed, not everything they can fix or change just because you want it to do something specific, but they listen and they really DO something trying to help you.
If you're thinking of extending the capabilities of your site and community builder. I got the Advanced package and it's great! Clean, to the point, friendly, you get an answer within a DAY! Now, show me another place you will have that!
Strongly recommended!
Thank you for your review and vote on our website (as you said, you didn't review the extension in here).
We're a bit surprised by your review and wonder if you are viewing our new website, which is completely redone since begin of this year, or another website: just in case:
Website of Community Builder: http://www.joomlapolis.com/
Regarding uninstalling CB: Uninstalling Community Builder is just a matter of uninstalling the component and the modules you installed. Nothing more required, as CB and CB Team plugins are cleanly implemented, not modifying any joomla tables nor any joomla files or directories. So here again we wonder if you are reviewing CB or something else.
You are really welcome to post to our forums on joomlapolis.com suggestions for improvements in our website in case something wasn't clear for you. It will be much more useful than here.
That is a problem but the real problem is that i now have to pay to get support.
That is a problem becouse no one ever metioned this problemm before. Cant find it in a forum. It is a bug in CB (i build many sites and never came accross this). Tried firefox, Explorer chrome. Links dont work. Idem tab management.
So de good is for the 1.5 version. i understand that i dont get free support for the usage. But as a free user im a bugfinder and would expect a place to report that.
We have support forums which are free of charge, support forums with guaranteed same-or-next business day reply for a modest yearly membership fee giving access to many CB Team plugins, and private support as well. You can see all our support options (from free to private tickets to consulting) here:
http://www.joomlapolis.com/support
Unless you are in a deadline hurry and need business-level dedicated support, no need to pay for accessing community support: Please use our free forums for free community support (and before that search all our forums for free, including free and advanced/professional for replies to already asked questions):
All our support forums are readable and searchable publicly, and if you go to:
http://www.joomlapolis.com/ then follow menus: Support->Forum->Search
and if you type in the search field of forum just the release number 1.6.2 you will find a threads in first search results that describe clearly that Joomla 1.6.2 bug and the need to upgrade to Joomla 1.6.3 to fix this Joomla-bug.
Well, since this review aka support request got approved by the JED, here is the reply to your support request as you could easily find by simply searching our forums:
- Joomla 1.6.2 has a major bug breaking most major third-party components, that got fixed in Joomla 1.6.3 that got released days after 1.6.2 beacause of this major Joomla 1.6.2 bug that you experienced.
What you really get are extensions that don't function as promised (GroupJive AutoJoin doesn't work) and quicker responses from the developers to tell you how wrong YOU are. That is, until you prove that their software has bugs and then they go silent. (Fresh install of latest Joomla 1.5 and CB 1.4, CB still reports a user database problem).
Stick with the free part of Community Builder and you'll be OK. Most of what the paid extensions do can be found elsewhere for free.
Readers here (and the JED team) can easily review this review and compare it to the facts in daviator's threads mentioned in his review (urls below) to make their own opinion on statements in this review:
In particular it is visible on the threads that:
1) Support has been provided quickly, diligently, and timely,
2) a quick bug fixing solution has been provided in the first thread to the bug found by davidator on this new auto-join feature of GroupJive 2.3.
3) the report of database problem given by CB is correct, there is an error in daviator's database collation being different of joomla's connection collation.
4) The review items posted are not reviewing CB itself.
5) We do take support as well as mutual respect very seriously.
Related threads:
http://www.joomlapolis.com/forum/154-advanced-members-support/162925-2518-cannot-figure-out-auto-join
http://www.joomlapolis.com/forum/154-advanced-members-support/163045-error-when-checking-user-user-database
http://www.joomlapolis.com/forum/154-advanced-members-support/163664-font-problem
http://www.joomlapolis.com/forum/154-advanced-members-support/163240-help-with-minor-but-annoying-spacing-issue
All our Professional and Advanced forums are readable for everyone - so people can see the level of support for Advanced and Professional members by themselves:
http://www.joomlapolis.com/forum/index/152-priority-support-for-advancedprofessional-members
As CB 1.4 runs fine on thousands of Joomla 1.6 sites, we would love to have been able to help you, but for that you need to use our forums and not this review system.
Joomla 1.6.2 itself had a bug which broke most extensions, and thus Joomla team released quickly a release 1.6.3 fixing that bug.
Just as a reply regarding the "lost some hours of work (to) rollback the entire site and": All our install documentations have a step number 0 which states something like:
- "As usual before installing any joomla extension, backup first".
Thus a rollback can be easily and quickly done if something in the site is non-standard and incompatible with the new extension installed.
So if you need a good community software, then this is the one you should use.
My review is 3/5 because of the following:
I've been using the previous versions with little to no issues what so ever. KUDO's.
But upon doing a fresh 1.6 Joomla install to a subdomain, and then a CB 1.4 install, I've encountered some odd sessioning issues, and been unable to login via the CB login module what so ever. Thus forcing me to have my users use the default joomla login form to get logged in to the site at all. The error said I needed to enable cookies in my browser (already enabled) or reload the page, which had 0 effect towards fixing the expired session.
It seemed fine until I decided I wanted to update my profile image, then the session handling broke, and the work flow failed to work as expected.
Also the Workflow module doesn't seem to work either. Its visible and configured correctly, just doesn't seem to populate any moderation links in the module as it should when pending images are yet to be approved. I've done this plenty of times on older versions on other sites i admin, with 0 issues.
So I'm not really comfortable suggesting people upgrade to 1.4 if running 1.6.
IMO stay away from J1.6 and CB 1.4 until you have your sandbox domain heavily tested with these new versions. Because nothing is worse then bringing down a live site to fix issues that were caused during a upgrade/update.
Hopefully this isn't some obscure process or configuration of J1.6 or CB1.4 that I'm overlooking, because my foot wouldn't taste good.
I have been using Joomla for just over 2 years and am currently managing just over 100 joomla sites, of these 5 also use community builder.
CB is quick and simple to install, works straight from the box and has a wide range of easy to install and use 3rd party modules and plugins.
I have never had a days downtime on any site using CB, and over the 5 sites have over 2000 registered users.
I have never had to use their support, so cannot comment on their abilities, this just shows how easy it is to install and use.
Thanks to everyone in the Joomla and CB development teams. I love you all.
I installed this on a joomla 1.6 site and it istalls nice and easy. The disapointing part is the setting up. After 4 hours and lots of coffee I finally got the site the way I wanted it to be.
The best part of this extention is the add-ons for it. I was amazed at how many there actually is. Which makes it the best one to get.
It's good, but it could use more...There is no community activity wall, like on Facebook..and it could use much more. Unfortunately, I left community builder. I finally went with a community plugin on wordpress, that was more like facebook.
I love joomla and I still use it on every site I have, I just wish they would push developers to improve their components. Or they will lose more people to wordpress, I know several who have.
