Question JomSocial vs Community Builder CB

I recently switched over from community builder and i have no regrets

At first i was kind of hesitant about swithing because of the price & the lack of plugins due to JomSocial being so new

Azrul sent me a promotion saying that i can try out Jomsocial for a $1 for 30 days...and afterwards pay the rest....and if i didnt like it...they would refund my $1

I installed Jomsocial & instantly fell in love with it.
the functionality is just amazing.....it comes with most features that you have to download for CB already integrated. They even have a migration script to make your transition from CB to Jomsocial very smooth. As for the plugins that i thought i was missing...i have found many very effective replacements to the CB ones, and as for the ones that i have not been able to get......the contrast between the 2 is so great...that i am willing to go ahead & wait.

I have been so pleased with Jomsocial that i went ahead and paid it off early...my trial wouldnt be over until May 7th

If you want a professional site....Go with Jom Social

If you want a hobby site get CB because its free

I agree, the social networking gimmicks seem to appeal to younger people. My "mature" users much prefer the structure of the forum. I'm trying to provide the best of both, and Joomla helps me do that.

I've been using VBulletin but it's extremely difficult to customize and it's in a rigid forum style. With Joomla, I can "Add-on" other things to the Forum. It helps me step outside the boxy forum and provide some other things to the site users. While still offering a forum that they love. I've switched to Kunena for the forum app.

I think that's a very interesting assessment, and I agree. Seems as if it's the kids who are all excited about social networking. My collector group of middle-age to older adult women could care less about the social side.

We would, however, like to use signatures in the forum. So what you're saying is, Community Builder is the reason why they're not showing up in Kunena? If I uninstall Community Builder, I wonder if we'll get those functions back?

prilly wrote:

We would, however, like to use signatures in the forum. So what you're saying is, Community Builder is the reason why they're not showing up in Kunena? If I uninstall Community Builder, I wonder if we'll get those functions back?

You don't need Community Builder for signatures to appear in the forums but you don't need to uninstal Community Builer either. Technically-speaking, when Community Builder 1.2.1 is used correctly, users can modify their forum signatures from their CB profiles and Kunena will display them. There's a tremendous lot written here, in these forums, on the subject of signatures.

I have both CB and JomSocial but I turned them off. Deleted JomSocial, I can't wait any longer for them to add simple stuff like photo quotas.

As you say, my users like the Forums. They REALLY like the forums, that's where they are happy. It's more of a group experience than what the social sites provide.

So, I'm going to use Kunena with UDDEIM and JoomGallery. The advantage in using a TRUE Joomla forum (rather than PHPBB) is being able to add activity modules on either side to dress it up. I like this a lot better than VBulletin, which is a good program but Joomla is so much more fun to customize. Besides all the extra stuff you can add to Joomla.

I hope Kunena doesn't get too tangled with the social fad programs. There's more power in Kunena than any of those social toys. I'm not even going to bother any more with looking at Tuiyo, Joomunity, Anahita, Elgg or any of them. I'm going to focus on what I can do with Kunena, which is a good solid program. No more distractions....

I agree and I disagree - I am Canadian and we like to sit on the fence !!!

I would love to utilise a forum exclusively however, today, there are many services they just do not provide which social extensions such as JS do - although loosely.

Jomsocial
Where JS fails, IMO, is twofold: 1) The activity stream. There is no point having a front page that says A joined the community, B joined the community, C joined the community. Such as waste / adds no value. This is why I immediately put out the 'facebook look alike hack'. But even that didnt go far enough as it was not interactive itself - just for display purposes only to make it look more interesting. I believe the latest JS (1.5 starts to address this). 2) It also fails on tools to facilitate a group(s). Up until now it was pretty much about "me". I put my 'stuff' in for others to see. Out of my 6000 members how many really know me to bother looking at my profile. Who is really going to look at my profile to see my pictures unless I can share, tag, comment, etc. With JS 1.5 this is changing so perhaps the 'team spirit' will start to take some shape.
With CB these two are much worse.

Stepping back .... Firstly, you need to decide what type of community you are supporting. I have one which is very targeted, english football fan club. A 'proper' JS type site is perfect for this as we organise our own events which requires event planning, discussion, inviting members and non members, ticket sales, voting, live event coverage, and post event coverage - photos, videos, discussion, etc. A forum cannot handle this today. I can put this altogether with various joomla extensions but this is troublesome and causes much frustration with integration and the like. Whereas another community that I have is a bunch of ppl with nothing really in common except a consistent problem of teaching their kids math. While this community is huge it doesnt come together to interact and there is no real need for them to get to know each other. For this a forum works well.

Where a social site adds value is that it brings together a number of discrete joomla features: photos, discussion, videos, commenting into a central place that FACILITATES a community's activities. Unfortunately, JS doesnt do it well. CB even worse.

Where a forum does well, IMO, is like this community. We do not know each other but have a common single focus - kunena itself. We have no need to share photos, videos, etc. We do not have shared events, calendars, etc. Perhaps the kunena development team has this level of interaction but not "us". For them, they will use other tools to support their development and planning activities outside of kunena.

Where kunena would do well, IMO, to "take on" a social site, should they event want, would be to allow members to upload photos, videos, commenting and adding calendaring and repository creation. But these need to be accessible in a combined threaded, repository, calendar and/or event format. Typically, forums and thus their challenge, is that they are discrete, time sensitive, conversations that pass by very quickly - they do not typically have repository based environments and are not fantastic at knowledge sharing which is why you see forums supported by wikis for FAQs, documentation and best practises. One of the best forums I have seen was something called "Teamroom" from Lotus (a long time ago) which supported the threaded conversation like kunena plus facilitated repositories for media, events and project management, calendaring & scheduling and documents / wikis. Of course in those days the technology was different as was much of the terminology.

But as I said at the beginning it really comes down to the type of community you are supporting and the level of interaction between members.

the small icons that apears bellow the profile image is a plugin for Kunema?

mikelll wrote:

the small icons that apears bellow the profile image is a plugin for Kunema?

The small icons (e.g. birthdate, gender, location) are a standard feature of Kunena and your question is off-topic to this discussion.