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Community Builder - necessary? Recommended?

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  • Community Builder - necessary? Recommended?

    Posted 16 years 5 months ago
    • I'm completely rebuilding my site from the ground up and over the last few weeks have glanced at several things I may need. One thing on my list is Community Builder. Is this a necessary addition to my site? My primary goal for the site is ecommerce (a mix of downloads and shippable products). What would be the benefit to using Community Builder?

      I will be using:

      Joomla 1.5.8
      Virtue Mart
      1Pixel Out Mp3 player
      Joomla Content Editor
      Rok Box
      Rok Downloads
      And of course one of the nifty Rocket Theme templates. :)

      I am also considering forum options, probably Fireboard.

      Thanks for any advice or your experiences with CB!
      --Donnie
    • "I've got a theory: it could be bunnies."

      Donnie Maynard Christianson
      artist+worldbuilder
      Worldbuilder Media
      www.worldbuilder.io
    #242286
    • Ben Lee's Avatar
    • Ben Lee
    • Elite Rocketeer
    • Posts: 4193
    • Thanks: 42

    Re: Community Builder - necessary? Recommended?

    Posted 16 years 5 months ago
    • I have a site that's been up for a couple years now has made nearly every migration and update from early Joomla on up. I've also used various forums as well as community builder and various photo galleries. I'm currently setting up a site that's supposed to handle much more as far as people and everyone wanting their own blog and an extensive forum.

      After having been through a good bit, here's my suggestion as far as what is customizable, usable and upgradeable in the future.

      Community Builder is outstanding for a lot of things, but remember that it's a "Community" based component. If you have an active community where all users want to communicate with each other and you want the base of the site to rely on their profile pages, then it's a good choice. If you're focusing more on eCommerce, you may want to consider sticking with the core Joomla user component since your customers will most likely be logging in for access to your products or your content.

      With that said, the new RokBridge has been just about the best plugin for any Joomla Forum solution ever. I very highly recommend using phpBB 3.x for your forum and linking the two with RokBridge.

      phpBB has grown substantially and is by far the best forum solution out there now. It's not even a matter of opinion anymore, it simply is the best one with the brightest future.

      In phpBB, your users will have a community setting and access to forum profiles and everything else that Community Builder would typically be needed for. On the site I referred to earlier, I have both phpBB and CB and all it did was split up where the users look for forum info. It's sort of redundant.

      My new site will only use RokBridge and phpBB and not CB (I love it, I just don't need it).

      Here's some links to check out:
      Why Rockettheme is doing it:
      http://www.rocketwerx.com/blog/6-rockettheme/39-rockettheme-version-20-part-2

      RokBridge:
      http://www.rocketwerx.com/products/rokbridge/overview

      Templates that are soon to be released:
      http://demo.rockettheme.com/phpbb3/


      I made a custom template for my phpBB 3.x install from SporticusV2 for my site and I use RokBridge to link everything.
      My Joomla install:
      College Skydiving
      My phpBB 3 install:
      College Skydiving Forum
    #242648

  • Re: Community Builder - necessary? Recommended?

    Posted 16 years 5 months ago
    • Thanks Ben. Commerce is definitely the focus, so after giving it some thought and checking out your links and the CB site itself, I probably won't need CB for the site in question.

      Thanks!
      --Donnie
    • "I've got a theory: it could be bunnies."

      Donnie Maynard Christianson
      artist+worldbuilder
      Worldbuilder Media
      www.worldbuilder.io
    #242972

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