Update: Two new blog posts with more coming over the next few months. I had forgotten how writing down the design and architectural problems I face really do help with the process.

8 hours ago on azrul posted on twitter a tasty treat about a new product his company is working on, and a link to a teaser website (http://jomsocial.com).

The product is JomSocial, a social networking component for Joomla! According to the webite, JomSocial will include the following features:

• Custom user profile
• Personal messaging system
• Join and create interactive user groups
• Friend-buddy system

This alone would be powerful and exciting, but if you look at the sample image in the banner on the website, there is another top menu option called Apps. If this reffers to a system of plugins to integrate with other components, then JomSocial could really shake things up.

For those who don’t know, Azrul is the maker of MyBlog and JomComment which are some of the most widely used components in the Joomla! Community.

I am personally a big fan of their work, and use both components above on my main Joomla! website. If Azrul can bring the same elegance to JomSocial as they do to MyBlog and JomComment, we are in for a treat.

It is also worth noting that the Azrul team has been very good with prividing Community Builder plugins for their existing components. This is perhaps why they have developed JomSocial, to create what they couldn’t get in CB.

Links:

• JomSocial
• Azrul Homepage

You can go to the Joomla! Juice website here, or subscribe via iTunes through this RSS feed.

This image was taken by Rastin Mehr (Aristocrat), one of the talented developers at RMD Studio.

The image shows the Persian goddess Anahita, which clearly was the inspiration for the naming of their in development Joomla! Social Networking project. Rastin describes some of the backstory of this image on his flickr page:

The ancient Persian Goddess “Aredvi Sura Anahita” the divinity of Water associated with Fertility, Healing, and Wisdom in the universe. She is also associated with War, Protection, and Peace. Anahita means “the immaculate one”.

(The) Sculpture was first created by my grand uncle Jallil Ziopour. He was a Fine Arts university professor, cubist artist, and anthropologist. I think he reproduced the sculpture of Anahita based on his many findings during his excavations in Iran (not too sure which area exactly. ) He gave me that print in person when I was 6 or 7 years old.

Click here to read the full story, very interesting.

Image above Released by Rastin under Creative Commons (some rights reserved). Click here to read license.

Community Builder

Availability: Currently available (1.2 version only available to paid documentation subscribers).

Cost: Free (GPL License)

Advantages: Wide Plugin Support

Disadvantages: Constrictive layout that leaves all websites that use Community Builder looking all too familiar.

Description: The current standard social networking component for Joomla. Well known for years by Joomla users, it has a very large following and a great deal of integration with popular Joomla! components. Community Builder (CB) is unfortunatly held back by the complex and largly un-customisable interface. This drawback prevents many users from adopting it. A recent update to version 1.2 (still not publicly available) did not address these concerns, however the 1.2 RC version for document subscribers did offer considerable improvements in sorting of lists.

JCommunity

Availability: Currently available

Advantages: Elegant Layout

Price: Core (free) and Plus (50 Euros) versions.

Disadvantages: Almost no integration with other Joomla! components.

Description: JCommunity appears as a Comminity Builder clone, and essentially it functions as this. It seems that JCommunity was built out of a frustration with the inegegant layout of CB, and some developers tried to duplicate CB, create a more modern interface and charge their users. JCommunity has not been around for as long as CB, and does lack some crucial features, such as a ‘friending’ system, and of course the crucial element of third party component integration. If the developers of JCommunity could intoduce a simple friend system, that was simpler than the convoluted CB approach, they would be well on their way. The integration with 3DP components is trickier. Perhaps the main reason that CB is so well supported by other developers creating their own plugins, is due simply to the large number of users, the sheer pervayance of CB. The only way that JCommunity can catch up is to select the top 20 Joomla! extensions, and create their own plugins.

Joomunity

Availability: Not Currently available

Advantages: N/A

Price: N/A (GPL upon release)

Disadvantages: Almost vaporware.

Description: Joomunity is a facebook clone for Joomla. The Joomunity website has an online demo, but it yet to be released. The best way to keep up with the latest Joomunity news is to keep an eye on the blog of the developer at Stony Hills Lab. The blog is posted to occasionally with screen grabs of new features, and looks very promising. However, a quick trip to the Joomunity forums, will unleash a world of discontent with users eagerly awaiting the release of Joomunity. The provocations to the developers with accusations and mocking posts about the apparent non-existence of the Joomunity project do get rather nasty. If the project does come to fruition, it will be a worthy contender to Community Builder. It also appears to be planning a decent extension framework.

Anahita

Availability: Not Currently available

Advantages: N/A

Price: N/A

Disadvantages: Vaporware.

Description: Anahita is the mythical Community Builder killer that is almost mentioned in whispers amongst Joomla! users desperate to create a poweful social networking website. In development by RMD Studio, Anahita is the very definition of vaporware. Next to no information is known about this project, other than it was developed (or is in development) for a cliend of the developers, and was planned for a general release. Questions about the project are directed to a thread on the Joomla! Forums, where RMD Studio member Aristocrat (Jooma forum handle) posted in Feburary of this year:

“The GPL version of Anahita is on the way, we are working on it every week, but please be patient we do need some time to coordinate things, for example the fact that Joomla 1.5 is finally stable has helped a lot.” [link]

There has been no further information on the project since, although the Social Networking page on the RMD Studio website does appear to have been updated recently (23 June 2008), so there is a chance that the project may see the light of a public release.

The interesting thing to note about Anahita, is the unique approach that the developers seem to be taking. Rather than cloning Community Builder, or mainstream social networks (such as facebook), RMD Studio have a more modern and elegant approach. The article on Social Networking, where one assumes they have thier thoughts on the Anahita project is very exciting. [link]

The thread has been a mix of congratulations to the CB team for its hard work on the upcoming release, along with whining from some users about the long wait until the release. The occasional negative post has been met with irritation from the CB user community as well as the development team. One could argue that this infighting could have been eliminated by not providing the platform for it, as well as not giving a tentative April release date (for Document Subscribers).

But it is hard to argue that the CB Team could have done anything else, the Community Builder extensions for Joomla and Mambo are among the most popular extensions in the world (the CB page on JED has been viewed over half a million times). This level of user-ship is always bound to attract impatience as well as excitement. I encourage you to read the full thread to get the entire picture.

The upside of the epicness of the thread has been that the number of Document Subscribers has seemed to increase dramatically, with the promise of an early RC download being available to subscriber, I include myself in this number.

The other advantage has been the increase in communication between the developers and the users. A recent example of this is this quote from Beat:

CB 1.2 is coming with some major new features…

More on those new features after some hours of sleep…

Teaser-Hints:

“No Preference”
“exactly”
“Between”
“Select image”
“Lost username?”

This kind of information is very interesting, but one can’t help but wonder what is gained from such secrecy on such a widely used extension.

You can read the Valley Wag story here: http://valleywag.com/367201/go-daddy-is-fightin-mad

The website uses CommunityBuilder and Fireboard to allow users to make comments about their local police officers. Comments under the specific officers range from

“kind, courteous, good natured. everything you would expect from an exceptional police offer.” 

to

This cop was performing an unwarranted search of my car. I informed him that it was unlawful, and he said,“The law? I am the law!”

Anyway, my new favourite podcast is FLOSS Weekly, the TWiT Netcast Networks pocast about open source projects. It is now my dream to hear a FLOSS episode about Joomla! When this happens, my life will be complete.

Image above from twit.tv.

Hello Joomla fans!

For the past few months, I have been working on an unofficial blog about Joomla! You can check it out here:

http://myjoomlanews.com/

The reason I began this blog, was because I felt that there was a lack of enthusiast blogs about Joomla! that where not connected to businesses that produce templates, components, or books about Joomla. Many of these blogs are brilliant, and you can find them all by googling “Joomla Blogs”. After you go through the search results for joomla blogging extensions, you will come across them.

So anyway, I started My Joomla News, to try and be just as interesting as Amy Stephen’s http://opensourcecommunity.org/, it is a lot of fun, but I still feel like it should be more.

So I am putting out the call for fellow Joomla users to become contributors to the blog. So if you are interested in posting opinions about Joomla, sharing news about cool new extensions, and experiences about using Joomla that doesn’t quite fall into the category of a joomla forum post, let me know in this thread.

It will be brilliant to develop a communal blog all about Joomla that is as fun and interesting as the joomla community itself.

I also have a secret desire to be part of a Joomla podcast, as this is something our community is lacking. Especially since Joomla Jabber has broadened their focus to include all CMSs. Hopefully a group of Joomla bloggers working together will be able to achieve a Joomla podcast of the quality of TWiT (http://twit.tv/twit)

Cheers,

Nicholas.

They are all worth watching, not just for Melbourne Joomla users. Special mention to Joomla! superstar Brad Baker, always worth listening to. Read on for the full list of videos, or click here to go straight there.

Here is the full list of presentations in Google video form:

1. Norm Douglas – Installing Joomla
2. Dinah Randall – Joomla Templates
3. Damian Hickey – Joomla & Freeway Open Source ECommerce
4. Russell Winter – Joomla Security
5. Sam Moffat – Joomla 1.5 – Features and Migration
6. Brad Baker – Joomla Hosting
7. Leslie Hawthorn – Google Highly Open Participation

Go here to view them all: http://joomladay.org.au/session-videos