These days most of us own at least one digital camera, whether it is a point and click or a more sophisticated Digital SLR. If you own a digital camera, the next most obvious thing to do after taking wonderful photos is to upload them somewhere. But where? How should you decide? Should you just follow everyone else and create an account with Flickr, Picasa or other less popular photo sharing sites? Some of us will just upload the photos onto Facebook. After all sharing your holiday photos, creative photos, etc. is a social activity we humans do.

There are some of us who may decide that we want to be more geeky and install a copy of an open source photo gallery software on our self-hosted account and have full control of administering and designing the layout. Whether you’re the former or the latter, you will have to make a decision.

So what are the benefits of using Flickr, Picasa and the likes as our photo sharing platform?

The benefits of using Flickr, Facebook and other photo social networking sites are:
1. You don’t have to worry about patching the software when there are new releases.
2. You don’t have to worry about doing a backup in case anything were to go wrong.
3. You don’t have to worry about SEO, i.e. making your photo site friendly to the Google crawler.
4. You instantly announce to your friends that you’ve just uploaded beautiful photos. That is taken care of by the photo sharing software.
5. Essentially you have peace of mind and don’t need to hire a webmaster or an I.T. person to get things started.

But…some times we want to make our photo sharing web site unique. Some times we want to have our own design and theme. Some times we want our own domain name, like www.beautifulphotos.com. Or we want to start our own photo sharing social networking site. So we go and research and see what open source software is available and then we install it on the hosting site that we own.

How do we decide which photo gallery software to use?

Let’s list a few of the photo gallery software that are commonly used.

1. ZenPhoto
2. Gallery
3. Coppermine
4. Pixelpost
5. Piwigo
6. 4images

Now we are spoilt for choice. How should we decide? In Part 2 of this blog post I will talk more about the software that I have listed above and help you decide. I will share with you my personal favourite too.

This is the 2nd part to my post entitled Getting Joomla excited! In this post I will write about the popular Community Builder extension and how to install the extension.

In Part 3 I will look at implementation of the extension and how to add Community Builder plug-ins and finally I will also showcase what I have done on my website with the Community Builder extension. All of this was done without a line of extra coding so Joomla enthusiasts can implement the Community Builder extension without having to be a coder.

The Community Builder extension

The Community Builder extension is the brainchild of the guys at www.joomlapolis.com. It extends the capability of Joomla’s membership module and transforms the Joomla CMS into a full-fledged membership and community site. If you are using Joomla CMS without the Community Builder extension and try to build a community website or portal, you will experience a lot of limitations.

What Community Builder provides
1. Better User Management module.
2. Ability to add additional user fields which is not possible using Joomla’s standard User Management module.
3. Ability to add and manage tabs.
4. Supports various plugins written for the Community Builder extension.
5. List management
6. Utility to synchronize the Joomla/Mambo User table with the Joomla/Mambo Community Builder User Table and perform a series of tests on the Community Builder database, user fields and user database.

Community Builder is not a free extension
For the goodies that Community Builder will bring to your Joomla website, there is a fee to pay to download, install and implement Community Builder. I paid something like 35 EUR for the download and if you want to obtain the documentation, you will have to pay more. They call it subscriptions. Here is the link www.joomlapolis.com

Installing Community Builder extension

Summary of Installation and Initial Setup Steps:
1. Install com_comprofiler component
2. Install mod_cblogin module
3. Install mod_comprofilerModerator module
4. Install mod_comprofilerOnline module
5. Enable CB Login, CB Workflows and CB Online modules
6. Select Name Style parameter from Community Builder Configuration and Save. Run Community Builder Synchronize Users tool.
7. Disable Joomla/Mambo login modules
8. Add new Public menu item to Community Builder component
9. Add new User List menu item
10. Run Load Sample Data tool (optional)
11. Adjust Community Builder and Joomla/Mambo CMS settings to allow registrations only through Community Builder
12. Done!

In this part I will cover step 1 through 4. The rest of the other steps will be covered in part 3.

1. Install com_comprofiler component
a) To install com_comprofiler.zip, click on Extensions > Install/Uninstall from the Joomla Administration menu.

c) Install – you can either upload the package (zip file) and install or copy the unzipped files to the tmp folder to install or install from a remote URL.

As the install file size is large, it will take time to install com_comprofiler.zip.

My suggestion is to unzip the file and ftp the files to the tmp directory and install it using the second option described above.

2. Install mod_cblogin module

a) To install mod_cblogin.zip, click on Extensions > Install/Uninstall from the Joomla Administration menu.

c) Install – you can either upload the package (zip file) and install or copy the unzipped files to the tmp folder to install or install from a remote URL.

IMPORTANT if you use the core Joomla or Mambo login module the users will become out of sync with community builder. I will show you in part 3 how to synchronize the users to avoid this problem from happening.

3. Install mod_comprofilerModerator module
a) Install mod_comprofilerModerator.zip as a module
b) This is an optional module and it is only needed if using moderator features but I suggest that you continue to install this in case you wish to use the moderator features in the future.

You install the mod_comprofilerModerator module exactly the same way as step 1 and step 2.

4. Install mod_comprofilerOnline module

a) Install mod_comprofilerOnline.zip as a module.
b) This is an optional module which displays list of online users. I suggest you proceed to install this module.

You install the mod_comprofilerOnline module exactly the same way as step 1, step 2 and step 3.

Summary of Part 2
In this part, I have written about the Community Builder extension, what it is and what it can do to enhance Joomla as a membership system. I have also covered the installation of Community Builder extension.

In part 3, I will go through step 5 through to step 12 and enabling Community Builder plugins.

If you missed Part 1, you can read it here – Getting Joomla excited!

Do you know how easy it is to get a Content Management Software (CMS) website up and running? I’ll tell you how easy it is. Recently, I decided to create a website for my family and I wanted it to be an open source CMS with good user management module, available templates and lots of plug-ins or add-ons. I also wanted to put the site together as quickly as possible with minimum coding. The reason for the website is to create an environment for sharing and staying in touch. My family members live in various parts of the world and if we are lucky, we see each other once a year. Now with the generation Y kids growing up, I thought it was time to network and get to know each other better, especially the next generation. Hence, the idea of a common website.

Joomla came to mind as a CMS platform that I can install and try out. Although Joomla wasn’t my first choice. The hosting company I am with, Bluehost, provided multiple CMS installs that I could choose from and install was easy using Simple Scripts or Fantastico Deluxe.

Within minutes, I had installed Joomla 1.5.8 using Fantastico Deluxe. Once the installation was completed, I login to the Administration site and started putting the site together.

The beauty of using Joomla CMS is its vast availability of extensions and the community developing, supporting and building the product for its user base. Joomla’s extension directory has over 3,500 extensions which you can download, install and configure for it to appear on the front-end of your website.

Here are the extensions I downloaded and installed.

1. ccBoard Forum to add a discussion forum in the CMS
2. Event List to create and display a list of birthday reminders
3. Phoca Gallery to add a photo gallery and photo management on the front-end
4. yvComment to allow users to post article comments
5. JoomlaWorks Simple Image Rotator to display rotating pictures on the website
6. ShoutBox to add interactivity by allow users to post short messages/shouts on the home page
7. JoomlaWorks AllVideos plugin to embed online streaming videos inside the content items as well as video or audio content that resides either on the server or some remote server.
8. Finally, I added the Community Builder extension which extends the website user management systems and management of users.

Key features of Community Builder : extra fields in profile, enhanced registration workflows, user lists, connection paths between users, admin defined tabs and user profiles, image upload, front-end workflow management, integration with other components, like PMS, Newsletter, Forum, Galleries.

Just by configuring the extensions and tinkering with sections and categories to appear on the front-end menus, I put together a CMS website without having to add a single line of PHP coding. The power of Joomla is in its CMS framework and its vast resource of extensions. Now Joomla has got me all excited about creating more website.

Here is a screenshot of the family website using Joomla.

Next: More on Joomla’s Community Builder extension