The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I had been asking Bernard for the integration of Openinviter in AUP for over a year. He finally took the time and integrated it right on time for a promotion we were preparing on our website, that has a VM powered on-line store. The idea was to get more people into the site, to receive the newsletter. More people receiving the newsletter, more purchases on the on-line store. That simple.

Rules for the contest: during the whole February 2010 we asked people to invite their contacts to join the site. In the beginning of March we would check the points and give away 3 prizes to the 3 top inviters. Everyone would receive one point per email sent and 20 points for successful registration.

Some tweaks had to be done to Joomla core registration in order to immediately login the user after first registration and direct him to the AUP invite feature. That was critical to assure a smooth registration process+immediate invitation (like the feature on Parainvite). We also had to create a secondary flow of email validation, sent in the background after registration, to avoid spammers and false registrations. By the end of February we had to manually check for these false registrations and remove the referral points.

Early in February there were around 250 registered users. We announced the campaign using the newsletter, Facebook, Twitter and the website. People started flowing in.
In mid February Bernard warned me that openinviter was already available with AUP and we immediately installed it and made another newsletter reminding people of the campaign and preliminary results. That boosted invitations even more.

At March 1 2010 we counted the results: we had gone from 250 to over 800 members!
At present day there are still registrations coming in.

So here it is. A success. Thanks to Alpha User Points. Bernard, you're the best.

By the way, we had some questions in the integration features and Bernard replied in the forum always in less than one day. That's a better result than many commercial components provide. Truly amazing.

Just some final thoughts on this:
- I think AUP has the potential to become a must have for any site, not only for it's ability to award users for actions, but also for it's ability to make users invite others. That's the basis of Facebook growth and we all know where it's taken it. Thanks Bernard for the effort in integrating openinviter.
- AUP can easily become a powerful Affiliate marketing tool. With the right rules for tracking for example, Virtuemart sales and AEC membership subscriptions, this can become THE affiliate component for every joomla site. Just think of three simple scenarios:
a) A VM store where you automatically convert every purchaser in a affiliate and take him to the AUP invite right after his first purchase.
b) A community site where you reward users for their activity and also for inviting other users to buy premium memberships.
c) A community site where users create their free and premium content and you give them part of the revenues for the premium content subscriptions or pay-per-view.

Of course, this may involve a lot of work and coding. But this would clearly take AUP to the next level and maybe into a paid component like AEC or Jomsocial.
Just some thoughts.

Anyway, thanks Bernard for the work in this great tool. Once again, You are the best.

This is simply just an awesome component. Giving awards, medals, and points for things done on your site is a great way to get more people to join your site and contribute content.

I really like medals feature. Say you have the Seyret video component, you create a custom plugin for AUP to give 25 points when a person uploads/adds a video. You can create a medal when a person reaches say 1000 points from adding a video. The look of the medal is up to you as you select the image to use for the medal.

Creating plugins to work with other components is as simple as pasting some code at the end of a function (e.g. function to add a video). Then you create a simple XML file to tell it the name of the component. The XML file is your "plugin."

It also gives people the ability to purchase points as well as donate points to others. The possibilities are endless. You can rename "points" to anything you want if you really wanted a customized solution to work with the theme/topic of your website.

The Community Builder integration is just awesome as well. The points layout (when adding to menu) allows you to select CB for the profile. Each "tab" you have in CB is a slide menu and it tells you what % of your profile is completed/filled out.

One thing that stops me from using it! I use CB and what doesn't make sense is in the setup it asks if you want to integrate with CB profile and you say yes. Then you see your CB picture in the User Points profile which is perfect. BUT, then it says to upload an avatar or picture to complete more of your profile but you don't get the upload tab because of your choice to integrate with CB.
If your picture is already there, why doesn't it see this and give you a further completion of your profile?

If I am going to integrate with CB, use CB instead of asking me to upload a separate picture for Alpha user points. Then, the only way to get the upload tab in your AlphaUserPoints profile is to turn off the CB integration. Now you have really separated your profiles and could use two different pics which gets confusing. Not good.

If you can have Alpha User Points see that you have a CB picture already and give you further completion percentage of your profile it would work perfectly..

I use it and it works very well ! It fits all my needs.

I think it's a very good component and now with the integration of the Community Builder it's even better. There's just one thing that makes me not to use it : the fact that in the user's list appears the administrator , and anyone can find out what the administrator username is. It's like using "admin" as the administrator username.

This is one of the most creative Joomla components I have come to use and I LOVE IT!. Not only is it well developed but it also adds a valuable service to any website and the website members will love. I highly recommend it to anyone.

This is my first review and i had to this ..this is the best extension for joomla and without this i wolud have not even thought of creating a Joomla Website. Now lot of Rules are Developed for this (check there forum).
Thanx a Lot to Developer But only words of Aprreciation are not enough one must contribute to them for there great work and i am sure gonna do this when i will get my first pay check from google

This is a nice feature for communities, but it works mainly whit their own system and Joomla, the only integration with Community Builder is the login sistem and nothing else. This extension would be really cool and interesting y it could work with CB fields. I'll rate better when they universalize the component. Sorry for my English.

This is so easy to use - I downloaded it about a month ago and am using it on a site with SOBI directory and alpha userpoints for a restaurants directory.

I am a novice - the only problem I have that I haven't yet figured out is why the invite friends won't recognise any emails - it did work for a few days and then it stopped.

In all fairness - this is probably something I can resolved If I TRIED - I would recommend that you use this without hesitation for any community project

This is one of the best things I've seen for Joomla 1.5
Its easy to set up and use and the support on the forums is really good. Its amazing how many things you can use this with just by putting some code here and there.

If you have a website that is community driven then you NEED this.

I track this points system since I started Joomla sites and recently I decided to integrate it.
I made a good choice!
System is so easy with powerful options from start. If you need any modifications and integration with other components it is so easy to implement (you just use standard AUP code where you want to put it and that's it).

Now I can play with my community as long as I want to - and it brings me back to the old times of fun and gaming :)

This comonent is really fantastic. :-)

This extension is so huge and there is possibility so many things. Developer is expert what he do (all thanks for he this great extension and guidelines what is direct in component), but mayby couple debugging users or SVN would be great. I love this =D

This is a very useful addon for any Joomla site. It gives your users a reason to be a member or affiliate. I can think of a number of useful reasons to install this. Cheers to the developer.

This is a must-have extension for a community site. Your members earn points for their participation, they can award another member some of their points, they can get promotional codes for more points through contests and activities. Your members will be ecstatic at being able to earn points! The component provides a fantastic way to build participation.

However, there is a single huge drawback; there are limited means for your website mmembers to spend or redeem the points they earn.

Automatic points 'spending' through additional components, is what this component is designed to do. There are no premade spending rules, so 'Spending' must be accomplished by your site admin through some coding. For your members to 'spend' their points, you must code new spending rules into your API and Virtuemart, first by coding into your API component then creating a new .xml rule for the AlphaUserPoints extension.

------------------------------------------------
This is from the developer instructions to develop a 'spending' rule.

"Just insert the following API in the component code where needed. The best is to make it follow
a user action that could give the users some points or take some. For exemple in a comment system component
or in a forum, just add the API after the comment or topic INSERT query in the database.

a) Use - Basic API

///////////////////////////////////////////
$api_AUP = JPATH_SITE.DS.'components'.DS.'com_alphauserpoints'.DS.'helper.php';
if ( file_exists($api_AUP))
{
require_once ($api_AUP);
AlphaUserPointsHelper::newpoints( 'function_name' );
}
///////////////////////////////////
-------------------------------------------------

Be prepared to understand the above, for volunteer developer support in writing a spending rule refers you to the above instruction.

Manual subtraction or addition of points is not immediately possible. There is one back-end work around. An existing bonus points rule can be edited to carry a single positive or negative value. This 'bonus' rule is an additional means of adding points to a single user, but is the only means of subtracting a single value of points from any user. It can only be done with one value for a single user at one time. For a different value of negative points, you must edit the rule.

Wish list: Capability to setup spending points that is as easy as setting up earning them. Perhaps to create a link to 'buy this item with your user points' function into your FB or CB components or a Joomla system article, some pre-coded spending rules, or even additional 'bonus' rules that can be set to different values or mass-applied.

Rating: A good component that is 'out-of-the-box' easy to use for one objective (earning points) earns an excellent for its ease in set up, ability to increase member participation, and excitement brewed among your membership as they earn points. But, as it is difficult to use for its complimentary objective (redeeming the points earned) earns only a 'fair' for that important aspect. Hopefully, we'll see this promising extension become more uniform in its userability and become 'Excellent' all around.

This is a good component that some of my clients were expecting!

All rules inside the component are very usefull.. now my visitors are maniacs getting a lot of points.

it is super , only thing i don't lik is there are people earning on his back. Also thermus be more public rules , like if you hit any page also language files are not yet to find. So maybe we can help him to get it bigger

For a long time I though AUP is a component for rating other users like in Ebay. But actually it is for evaluating the individual user's contribution to a community site. It is good for motivating the user.

I wish its modules could display CB avatar.

This component is equipped with all important features as a point system. Easy to use. Great work! Look forward to seeing more useful addons from alphaplug. Well done!!

This is a pretty simple and well designed component. Really want to see other components doing integrations *hint hint*