From the time that Facebook has become popular, everyone wanted to have something similar for themselves. Everyone wanted to catch a comparable number of users and keep them within their website. Of course, social networking, as we know, really took off with Friendster.com, launched in 2002.
Our first GavickPro full social template was elveSocial released on 3 July 2009, we have trusted Azurl company and that’s why we used JomSocial 1.2 for it. Component which then became more and more popular for people who were tired of using CB. It was a year ago, let’s see what we have now in December 2010.
JomSocial (jomsocial.com) – is still very popular social networking for Joomla! site. Current version 2.0.x added a lot of new features. One of the major features is Multiple profile types where Users can select their profile types which are predefined by admin on the back end. As a site administrator, you can also restrict group creations by different profile types. JomSocial now has a rating system on various parts of the social network. Users can like or dislike photos, profiles, groups, videos and many more.
In JomSocial 2.0, a site administrator has more control over the members. Even now, JomSocial supports basic privacy level when it comes to your personal information. You can select to share all your information either to the public, site members, or friends. In the upcoming 2.2 , you will get a complete control over every single detail of your personal data. Of course if you are our member you can buy this great component using $25 or $35 discounts. On JED, you can find over 100 extension specific addons for this component. I know many people who have little experience with Joomla, who quickly built the page using this tool. Some information about JomSocial you can find in two books about Joomla!. In March 2010 we used JomSocial again, building Party Freak template.
Community Builder (joomlapolis.com) – is good, but old tool for building community. Most of the people said it’s hard to use it. Version 1.3 has addressed over 30 artifacts and API improvements and is now also installable on Joomla 1.6 beta 14. On JED you can find 175 extension for this component. But I think that major changes of CB are bug fixes only.
Anahita Social Engine ™ (anahitapolis.com) – first time I heard about this project it was April 2009 and I remember I was very excited. One year later, I still believe that is a very promising extension for Joomla! but it still has alpha status (!). Anahita like JomSocial is a commercial open source solution available under the GPL license. But ASE source code is developed using the Nooku Framework. In this social framework, everything and everybody are represented as “nodes”. This means people, groups, events, blog posts, topics, pictures, albums etc. are all nodes.