I don’t know what’s wrong, I couldn’t find enough help, or any documentation about this plugin. The link that Nicholas posted only takes me to the download, and there is a post from kevin divine’s that says a really poor instruction.

Any help?

I am totally with you in looking forward to a new generation of Joomla extensions.

These new looser technologies that allow information to be connected across spaces is very powerful. Especially the OpenID, which you posted earlier. Everything is connected, and anything we can do to help make Joomla! as open as possible can only be good for our community.

Here is the link to Kevin’s User Meta page on Joomla Code.
http://joomlacode.org/gf/project/usermeta/

I’m looking into it now, and it’s pretty exciting.

The Joomla! community is a bit behind, IMO, with some of the SNing concepts. As an example, look at how difficult it is to get the community to Digg a topic.

I agree with your assessment of some of the older software being clunky and cumbersome, error prone, and even tacky looking, hard to style. J! v 1.5 will turn this around but not from upgrading the old to new coding structures. We will do things differently – and far better.

Kevine Devine created a plugin called UserMeta – it’s on JoomlaCode. When people finally figure out what he’s got there, that extension will see some big DL numbers. It is the new community building software backbone – without any bulk or any intended implementation. It allows you to *easily* extend Joomla!’s user definitions using the parameters column in the user table.

Recently, Kevin expanded this power by adding the capability to very easily link to user tables. This is an example of the strength of the new framework. Kevin basically unearthed intended use and made it easy for the rest of us to cash in on this flexible architecture.

The possibilities are endless.

Joomla! v 1.5 is incredibly extensible. It’s very easy to “write” extensions for that platform and it’s super easy to hack an extension into per user capabilities.

I’m *not* anxious to have all of the old extensions moved forward. Frankly, it’s time to say goodbye to some of the clunky stuff. It served us well, but let’s face it – the Internet is a different place than it was a few years ago.

I’m also having fun getting my own hands dirty. It’s an absolute blast to develop with Joomla! and it just gets to be more and more fun as I learn.

We are going to continue to see better extensions emerge and more and more serious developers, like Kevin and Rastin, will join us as they discover how powerful *and* simple it is to bend Joomla! into what is needed. That is what will move Joomla! into open and empowering social networking and out of the “forum and avatar age.”

We are moving on up!
Amy