New CB Activity streams encourage community participation

Written by Nick A.

The CB Team has just released the brand new CB Activity plugin for Professional and Developer members.

Promote and encourage your membership participation with realtime activity streaming on your website.

This add-on will bring new life to your website by showcasing your membership activities in a prominent and stylish fashion.

Activity events that can be configured are:

• new member announcements (registration event)
• sign-in alerts (login event)
• sign-offs (logout event)
• new friendships (connection events)
• profile changes (profile update events)
• image changes (profile image updates)
• guestbook entries (profilebook guestbook tab)
• blog tab entries (profilebook blog tab)
• wall tab entries (profilebook wall tab)
• gallery entries (profilegallery tab items)
• blog entries (CB Blog publications)
• group activities (all GroupJive events)
• forum posts (Kunena forum integration)

Users will be able to see their latest activities and the activities of  their connections on their user profile Activity tab. When viewing another user's Activity tab they will be able to see the activities of that user and of his/her connections.

The entire activity of your community (respecting members' privacy settings) is also available in a component-type view using a Joomla menu item type.

The CB Activity plugin is also available from the Packager Installer and it will be further enhanced and integrated in Community Builder 2.0.

Discuss this article on the forums. (14 posts)

Quality is like sex

Written by Nick A.

The recent back to back releases of Joomla 2.5.5 and Joomla 2.5.6 and the internal rush to push a CB 1.8.1 quality release out to the general public reminded me of my AT&T Bell Labs days back in the late 1980's.

It was a period that was inspired by quality metrics and improvement discussions. Phrases like "improve quality by a factor of X in Y years" were common in almost every single presentation or discussion.

In fact we were instructed by our supervisor to make sure we mentioned something about quality in all our talks back then.

I was preparing a talk about a new telecommunications service and how our internal newtwork design tool could support it when I realized that I had not said anything at all about the big Q word. So I prepared an extra single slide to start off my presentation and get the Q stuff over with so I could continue with the real (in my mind back then) important content.

Read more: Quality is like sex

Community Builder 1.8.1 Released!

Written by Nick A.

We are proud to release Community Builder 1.8.1 as a free download (as usual) and a highly recommended upgrade for everyone.

If you are using CB on a Joomla 2.5 site you should really upgrade to CB 1.8.1 and to Joomla 2.5.6. Yesterday's Joomla 2.5.5 security release also introduced new features and new bugs which are now already fixed with today's Joomla 2.5.6 release. Joomla 2.5.5 also broke quite a few third-party extensions, including CB 1.8.

So we decided to quickly release CB 1.8.1 that now works with Joomla 2.5.6 (and all other Joomla versions) and also fixes many CB 1.8 identified issues.

Thus, CB 1.8.1 is a recommended update for all CB sites. Joomlapolis is already using CB 1.8.1 as it is our policy to not only provide the highest possible release quality but to also thoroughly test our releases on our websites before public availablility.

We would like to thank our CB Testing Workgroup and specifically adje, bgies, forty, jciconsult, lavsteph, marionetarh, reinhard, sniper_rio, tschersich and thepiston for their valuable help during the last 48 stressful hours.

For a detailed changelog please see forum discussion below.

Discuss this article on the forums. (10 posts)

Joomla 2.5.5 released but not recommended

Written by Nick A.

Joomla 2.5.5 has just been released.

However there appear to be issues and bugs that have already been reported and Joomla 2.5.5 has broken CB 1.8 user saving process.

At this point we must recommend that existing Joomla installation should not upgrade to Joomla 2.5.5 and wait for next (hopefully soon) Joomla 2.5.6 release.

The CB Team is temporarily dropping all current in progress activities to work-around these Joomla 2.5.5 issues and to release a Community Builder 1.8.1 package as soon as possible.

[UPDATE 1] A quick fix for Joomla 2.5.5 breaking the CB 1.8 user save is now provided here.