Some important announcements were made during the Joomladay in Switzerland event held on November 15th, 2008 in Luzern. On behalf of the CB Team, Beat gave an hour long presentation (initially planned for 45 minutes) revolving around many behind the scenes activities that have been taking place during the past months.

This article will serve as an introduction to a series of preview articles that will present in depth the various new “work-in-progress” items announced by Beat.

In parallel to getting CB 1.2 RC3 bugs ironed out, the CB Team has been preparing a number of very cool plugins. Many of these have been requested before by the community and others were created to serve a real need and test various CB API enhancements.

The CB Team will be represented by Beat in the first ever Joomladay in Switzerland. Beat will be giving a 45 minute presentation regarding CB and things in progress. 

For those fortunate Joomlapolitans in the Luzern area on November 15th, 2008, it will be a rare treat to meet the CB core developer and get first hand insight about CB 1.2, in progress work and future plans.

Beat will also be making a number of important and exciting announcements and will also be giving live demos about CB and other CB related work in progress.

Community Builder 1.2 Release Candidate 3 has been completed by the CB Team. RC3 addresses all the issues identified in the RC2 forum area (24 issues) and also a dozen more found by the test team and the CB development team. CB 1.2 RC3 has been running on Joomlapolis for a few days now and we believe that it is a very close to stability release ... but this remains to be seen .

RC3 is available - once again - to our supporters (doc subscribers, language translators, testers, etc) as a thank you for there efforts and continued support.

RC3 also contains a number of very nice last minute features:

• custom field input validation
• integer field type
• image field type
• new CB Tool to check on fix integrity of user database
• more extensive layout facilities and substitutions (a professional template is in the making to take advantage of these new facilities)

Lets pound away and get Community Builder 1.2 stable out as soon as possible!

It's time again for a short update and progress report regarding Community Builder 1.2 Stable process !

We have now fixed all of the reported and identified issues of CB 1.2 RC 2, as well as about as much small issues that we found during tests. We have been testing the results in a first circle of alpha testers, and have just submitted to CB Testteam an internal beta 1 version of last CB 1.2 Release Candidate (internally named 1.2 RC 3 beta 1).

Following that beta, and depending on test-results, we will be issuing a last CB 1.2 RC 3 to doc subscribers here for a last and short tests-round. Our current goal is to have RC 3 ready in stable-quality by begin of October (but once again no promises - to many factors), and CB 1.2 Stable released free 1-2 weeks after.

CB 1.2 RC3 will have a few new features and improvements which will greatly improve the flexibility for user profiles, users-lists, and custom fields input validation. Also a new integer field-type has been added, with corresponding sorting and range-searching facilities. There is another exciting new feature in RC 3 that we will present when RC 3 is available.

At the same time, we have been actively adapting and developing CB team plugins and new modules, to run universally native, and have a few more in development.

There are many new things in the pipeline and very exciting developments in the works. Once again, we would like to thank all those who are supporting these efforts (doc subscribers, third party plugin developers, forum helpers, language translators, etc.) and everyone else patiently waiting for the stable release.

We are updating GroupJive!

About the new version of the component:

Because it is difficult to make a component J1.0 and J1.5 compatible without legacy mode, we decided to port GroupJive onto the Community Builder framework, which Beat, the lead CB developer introduced in the latest Community Builder release version 1.2.

We talked a lot about that and had discussions regarding the pros and cons of dependency on Community Builder. Since GroupJive was already Community Builder dependent, this might not affect many of our users. For others who may desire to install GroupJive without the CB Component: you only need the framework files of CB. We will guide you through how to accomplish this and demonstrate how to install.

Using the CB framework also opens up the possibility for 3rd party developers to write GroupJive plugins just like the plugins for CB.

The current state of the project is:

• We have ported the last GroupJive version onto the CB-framework
  
  
• GroupJive works with J1.0 and J1.5 native and should also work with Mambo (as does the CB Framework)
  
  
• A private test group is testing the component with J1.0 and J1.5 to find bugs associated with porting to the new Framework
  
  
• When we are ready, we will release the new version
  

Sincerely,
Michael aka Stiggi and your Groupjive Team