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Extensions Review ...
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Date: 2006/04/15 00:18
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By: nant
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Status: Admin
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Karma: 462
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Admin
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I just read the following review made by SludgeMeister on extensions.joomla.org (here).
The review states:
This is really a great component. It adds much needed functionality to Joomla sites, but there are certainly some pretty major and obvious drawbacks.
The pace of development CB has is not good. Its been near enough 6 months since it was released, 11k+ members on their site and not any significant updates in this time. There are little to no "official" Plugins/Addons released by CB, most of which are 3rd party and only 1 of these has been "officially" certified by CB ( Which makes me feel very safe when I install them! ). There is an update coming shortly, but as far as I can tell its mainly a stability release.
The support for CB is poor. Check out Joomlapolis and note that many of the threads go unanswered by any official CB staff. I can appreciate that they run a "paid" support service, which gives you access to the Community Builder Manual...but a massive amount of questions go simply ignored on their forums (I have started numerous threads myself and they have gone ignored). It seems the more "technical" the question the quicker its answered...Simple things get overlooked and get passed by.
You will lose quite alot of "choice" you have for components and modules when you install CB. Many Modules don't work with it...Numerous Components and Bridges the same. This is to be expected of course, but I didn't quite realise how much "choice" I would lose when I installed this.
Anyway, it IS a good component...But honestly, if you have a genuinely large Joomla community and are somebody who needs to develop at a good pace "with" your Community, I'd think carefully before installing this.
Since I don't want to hijack the review section of the extensions site, I am posting my comments here ...
- CB RC2 was release in November 2005 5 months ago. The first release of CB (beta 1) was release August 2004 (mambojoe.com site) - over 1,5 years ago.
- Official plugins are either released by the CB core team or have been reviewed by the core tem. At this time there is only one official plugin release and 2 more in testing
- Official support is poor - I agree. Unfortunately most of the questions and threads that remain unanswered are basic joomla questions. The CB core team has to prioritise its little free time in order to work on core releases and plugins. My intention is to get more people involved. Unfortunately, most people get what they need and leave without trying to help others. The newbie section was meant to be supported by other community members (see description of forum area) - unfortunately this has not been 100% successfull.
- It is stated by the reviewer that you loose quite alot of choice when installing CB. This is totally false! All components and modules that are compatible with Joomla without hacking - are 100% compatible with CB. On the other-hand components and bridges that are based on Joomla login hacks are of course questionable (see SMF bridge).
- CB is Joomla future proof - the CB team has been working with the Joomla core team and I believe that CB is the only (?) component on the extensions site that Joomla 1.5 compatible.
Also we do not have a paid support service - we just have a paid documentation service meant as a means to gather some expense money - we treat all community members the same when it comes to support issues (granted the support is far from good).
I really wish we were all rich and independent and could work for free on CB 100% of our time - we are not 
Post edited by: nant, at: 2006/04/15 08:33
Nick A.
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