Your Demo is slow during day time (we are located in Europe with 500Mbits/sec) but the GTMetrix test is not really good during night time too

Our demo site is wiped regularly and slammed with traffic regularly. It's going to slow down. It also has every product installed with heavy demos of each. It's not exactly a realistic scenario for a site, but a means of trying out each product. Regardless I'm still not seeing heavy load times of 7.4s. Even now with an uncached speed test the slowest result was 3.8s. Cache is 1.5s average. I however have made new CB Gallery and CB Activity releases adding lazy loading for all images which has helped. The remaining performance issues are mostly resources (CSS and JS), which can be alleviated with something like JCH Optimizer or using HTTP/2.0. CB can be as fast as you like depending on what you use basically.

Regarding the 'SEARCH members by countries/states cascading dropdown fields', please find information below :

For that functionality you'll need to use Query Select fields provided by CB Query Field. You can chain them together using the Update On feature in CB Core Field Ajax and CB Conditionals with field conditions. You'll need a database table of all the countries and states you want to provide. There is no inline search feature like in your video. This works on registration, profile edit, and userlist searching fine.

For information, you have 2 fields called countries & states in your admin demo but most of your demo fields are select or text fields !!! It will be a great idea and great help for the customers of your CB extensions if YOU could set up different types of fields in your demo (select, checkbox, radio, country/state with conditional fields, ...) ... moreover, you won't receive much question because we could find the answers in your demo ...

Every field type is demoed on our demo site across the multiple profile edit tabs. Text, checkbox, radio buttons, etc.. are all demoed there. This includes field types provided by plugins. Cascading demo is already provided for you under Demos profile edit tab under CB Query Field header where it shows Country updating based off Region and State updating based off Country. To have Country only display if a Region was selected you'd just use simple CB Conditional conditions for that. That same tabs has a CB Conditional demo.

For information, I have tried to set up countries/states cascading dropdown fields with your Admin Demo but your Demo is locked ...

We for obvious security reasons don't let the demo admin account execute whatever PHP or SQL people want. There's very few limitations on our demo site.

One more thing, we have checked your Documenattion regarding the CB Conditional extension and find nice videos ... but your videos are outdated (2016) and don't match at all your admin demo ....

We're a full time team of 2 people. I frankly just don't have the time to redo a bunch of videos. We'll update them when time permits, but we're not some 12 man team able to push that kind of documentation while maintaining all these products and support for them.

ccording to the above remarks, if we meet issues and If we send you the Username & Password of our Joomla Admin Panel, please do you agree to set up the simple exemple mentioned above with 2 countries and 2 states for each countries ?

No, that's not how support works here. See our Help Us Help You page below for what support includes.

www.joomlapolis.com/help-us-help-you

Best I could do is provide some configuration examples. If you need us to configure things for you you'd need to buy those services below.

www.joomlapolis.com/services

Regarding the private messaging, we have found a Youtube video tutorial for CB but its outdated with UddeIM :

For PMS you just need to publish the Private Message System plugin in CB > Plugin Management if not already published. You don't need to install UddeIM unless you want the features UddeIM provides.

For information, UddeIM doesn't work anymore with the latest version of Joomla.

UddeIM still works perfectly fine on Joomla 3.

In your online demo, we don't know when a user receive a new message in most pages ... please check your demo.

That's because we don't have an indicator displayed on every page. It's shown in the login module which is only on the home page and of course is shown on profile. This is working as expected. Our demo site is a product demo. It is not a "this is what a social site with CB looks like" demo. We're currently considering building a second demo site so we can cover both scenarios.

In your outdated CB video with UddeIM (see URL link above), we can see the message ''you have received 2 new messages'' in the CB Login module.
Please do you have the option 'You have received X new messages' in the CB Login module with your new CB private messaging ?

It doesn't matter if you're using the internal PMS functionality or UddeIM. That display is the same regardless and is enabled in your CB Login Module.

Most of your questions are about core CB. Core CB is free. I suggest simply just trying it.

CD & CBSUBS back ends are no longer intuitive or work as it used to. I have gone through your entire documents manual, but it doesn't help much as it's written from the point of view of what each button/link does rather than from a user perspective.

The CBSubs backend is unchanged. CB 2.x backend is significantly more intuitive compared to CB 1.x. CB 2.x backend also has a central control panel for navigating to CBs backend views in addition to our admin dropdown menu module usage. Individual plugins now have much more intuitive backend views for management purposes.

What exactly are you having issues with and what do you suggest for improving upon it?

CB & Kunena integration is a disaster, the only fields I can get to be recognized are username and avatar. Many of the fields are no longer editable either, and I've gone though the manual and done everything exactly as you say. Doesn't work for me.

CB Forums takes the field value and pushes it to Kunenas database profile. We do nothing beyond that for synchronizing profile data. What Kunena does with and how it displays this data is up to Kunena. For best control use the sidebar textarea usage to completely replace the Kunena sidebar with your own HTML and substitutions.

The old fields provided by Forum Integration aren't needed anymore as CB Forums can synchronize Signature for example from any CB field you want (e.g. create and use a textarea field as signature and configure it to synchronize). If you've any specific issues with any of them not synchronizing then please provide which ones.

Nick has also provided a video tutorial for configuring CB Forums for Kunena.

UddeIM integration is the same, and while users can still send massages, the links to profiles are broken. Again, followed closely Udde and CB instructions.

For UddeIM integration you only need to install the UddeIM component then enable Private Message System. What specifically is broken?

I do not use JomSocial, and maybe that's the problem, and your expectation. I don't want it, I don't want a Facebook type of community.

We came before JomSocial and we're not modeled after JomSocial. We use Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, and various social networking research resources as well as community feedback to determine what features we should be delivering. I don't expect CB to fit everyone's needs, but we certainly try. The biggest benefit of CB is its modular usability via plugins and its flexibility. We've users using CB for realtor sites (each profile is a home for sale) and many other non-standard scenarios.

The "Privacy" settings don't allow a user to log into the site and be "private", "hidden" or "invisible" whatever you want to call it, That would be the first use for the feature. I understand we can hack a workaround, but with all the other issues going on, that's the last thing I want to try.

That's exactly the purpose of the Profile Privacy field provided by CB Privacy. It will block all field API access for the fields selected in its field parameters and it completely blocks direct profile access. All the user has to do is edit their profile and set it to Private.

There's a huge lack of explanation on the changes you've been implementing for the new upgrades and what you're deprecating. You've phased out the Ajax filed, but there's no way to integrate it? Do users have to delete all their info and put it in again elsewhere? Where? How?

We've been doing Beta releases, news articles, and forge tickets recently to help improve upon this. Some smaller earlier plugins didn't receive the same treatment, which I apologize for. CB Ajax Text Field was just a text field made ajax. It's not needed anymore, because CB Core Fields Ajax can make any text field ajax in addition to other fieldtypes. Users shouldn't have to delete anything. Uninstall CB Ajax Text Field, install CB Core Fields Ajax, edit the old ajax text field and change its Type to Text then enable ajax editing for it.

The CB profile area of my site is really lame and hobbling right now. I can't delete all the user information and start again. Not an option. It's becoming more and more plausible to stop all "upgrades" in order to keep the site alive.

Don't understand what you mean by "lame and hobbling". Please provide a screenshot of the problem. If you've not done so yet be sure to run the canvas layout tool in CB > Tools if you upgraded from CB 1.x to migrate your tabs and fields display to the new canvas layout.

Please try thinking more as users and less as engineers when you implement changes.

That's the exact purpose of our CB Primer Book and our YouTube videos. When we launch our new website we'll be releasing even better documentation. You can find the CB Primer Book below as well as the YouTube videos.

CB Primer Book:
www.joomlapolis.com/component/docman/doc_details/753-cb-20-primer-book-101

Videos:
www.youtube.com/user/Joomlapolis/playlists

Some plugins are rendered redundant by others so we deprecate them. Some plugins have to be rewritten, because their codebase is old and unmaintainable. Some plugins I've basically learned over the years to write code better so they get rewritten to be significantly more efficient, user friendly, and featureful. There's many reasons for various changes all of which we typically document on our forge using tickets for their respective projects. Now that we're doing more active beta releases, nightlies, and news announcements it has become easier to be aware of what to expect.

With that said don't suffer in silence until the pot boils over. If you have an issue please don't hesitate to open a support topic for it and we'll be glad to help.

1. In the back end, the owner column is blank in both the Categories and Groups table views, and the user ID has been entered for all of them, and is a valid ID in the joomla user db. I'm using GroupJive as a client interface for website development/maintenance and it would really benefit me to see owners (project managers) next to groups (jobs).

2. In the front end, when Group owners make user invites, and pending invites are listed in the invite tab, usernames are not displayed. This makes it so that Group owners don't know who invites are out to, and who still needs adding; also doesn't reassure them that their invites have been correctly sent.

Please run GJ tools from GJ backend. You'll likely then receive an error informing you that formatname field is not visible. This field is absolutely required, if someone can't see this field, then they can't see names. This means if it's unpublished or on an unpublished tab you'll have no name display. GJ uses API to respect configuration and privacy controls instead of direct database usage.

3. This might be related to (2) but as admin, I get these site mails from owners with subject "..." and nothing in the message body. I think that it happens when Group Owners invite users, and should probably be telling me that Group Owner X has invited User Y to their group?

Group owners can receive (if configured) notifications of users joining/leaving. Category owners can receive (if configured) notifications of group create/edit/delete. None would contain no subject or body however. Please check within GJ configuration on the General tab what Notify By method you're using. If PMS it's possible if using UddeIM that it is sending a email notification.