Complete solution for your membership site

As promised (here), this article adds more functionality to the initial CB Helloworld plugin (described here). Please read the initial article first and if you have installed the CB Helloworld plugin provided in this first article please unistall it before proceeding any further. You can access the new helloworld plugin package here.

Joomla! core team released today Joomla! 1.5 beta, exactly one year after starting development, for community tests. Joomla! 1.5 is by no way a production site release, but is a big step forward for Joomla!

Community Builder team has participated in tests, debuging and some fixes to make sure that Community Builder interoperates well also with Joomla! 1.5 and has been one of the components used for testing the Joomla! 1.5 1.0 API legacy support.

As Community Builder uses some deep API functions of Joomla, a few adaptations have been needed for Joomla 1.5 beta and are currently in CB testteam. Please note that CB 1.0.1 does not run on Joomla! 1.5 beta. We will be releasing CB 1.0.2 maintenance release in the next days, with support for Joomla! 1.5, and some more to be announced soon. CB 1.0.2 will be a strongly recommended upgrade for all users, including Joomla 1.0.11 users and fixes also a few Mambo 4.6.1 API incompatibilities.

Stay tuned and happy playing with Joomla! 1.5 in the mean time.

Nov. 8th Update

Community Builder 1.0.2 build 3 has just been released to CB testteam for final tests. Expected date of release is currently Friday Nov 10th.

Nov. 10th Update

We found a few bugs in testteam build 3 of Community Builder 1.0.2 and are working on a new candidate build 4. Estimated date is moving to Monday/Tuesday Nov 13/14th for the stable release 1.0.2.

Nov. 14th Update

Community Builder 1.0.2 candidate build 4 has made its steps through testteam, and is now running on a few larger-sized live sites, which showed some last very annoying bugs, most of which got fixed. Although active CB-testteam members and CB dev team worked very hard in the last days, we didn't make it for today. Sorry about that, but... But we achieved something today which made us very happy, and will make most of you and your users also happy... weee...CB 1.0.2 flies. More at release time ;-) . Estimated date is now set to Confirmed Date status for Thursday Nov 16th for the stable release 1.0.2. Tomorrow, JoomlaPolis and test-sites will be updated with final build 5, and as soon as all fixes are fully tested, we will make the release. Thanks for your understanding and patience (and good night for today).

Nov. 19th Update

Community Builder 1.0.2 candidate build 5 is running on this site, as well as on a few other high-traffic sites. Almost all is ok now, and public release has been prepared, but a nasty last minute problem has been located on one of the live sites. We spent a few hours to down-drill the problem into a new security feature, using indirectly a php function, which we just found to be badly buggy in older but supported php releases. We are currently designing a work-around this nasty php engine bug, and as soon as it's tested, we will release. Hard to tell an exact release time yet, but we are trying to do our best to get this out the door asap. Sorry about the delay, but it's very very hard to predict when it will be ready for prime-time, as the work-around isn't trivial (actually no work-arounds are proposed for that php bug, except to update to latest. And as this is not an option for most hosted sites, we need to design our own workaround !

Many Joomlapolitans have asked (here) for a basic plugin example illustrating a skeleton CB tab based on the CB API published here. As with most first efforts in a new programming environment such a task is usually tagged as a "hello world" script. You can access the helloworld plugin package here.

The huge success and traffic of this site has prompted the team to investigate alternatives in order to keep performance levels as high as possible. Our 23,000+ active users and the increasing popularity of the Community Builder suite including the great third party plugins made it imperative to seek out the best hosting environment possible. This month-long investigation has been fruitful and we are now hosted very smoothly since two weeks by KreativMedia GmbH - our sponsor.

The entire Joomlapolis team is very excited about this arrangement and we feel that the worldwide community of community builders will ultimately benefit from the new environment. Please take the time and visit our new sponsors' page (Main Menu horizontal link) and discuss this news in the forums.

KreativMedia, the 23K+ Joomlapolitans thank you!

The Joomla extensions site team has created extra categorizations to support component specific extensions (such as CB plugins). Discussions about this have been going on since May 2006 (see thread here) and this week a decision and solution has been provisioned.

You can see all CB plugin extensions by visiting this area. The CB Team hopes that this new environment will give new momentum towards the development of new CB plugins.