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Category: News

Published: 29 December 2012

Last Updated: 29 December 2012

Hits: 12434

We are extremely excited and proud to announce and release CBSubs GPL 3.0 paid subscription membership management solution !

This is great news for everyone !

CBSubs GPL can be installed on an unlimited  number of websites and can handle an unlimited number of users.

CBSubs GPL 3.0 also has many new features (see discussion thread for changelog) and it now has support for PayPal Pro and Google Checkout, PHP 5.4 and of course for Joomla 3.0.

We have spent a little over three years of live deployment and fine tuning of the CBSubs framework that is currently powering thousands of paid membership sites and our very own Joomlapolis website.

This way we have verified that CBSubs is a  highly reliable, secure and robust paid subscriptions membership management solution. And now we are ready to offer this as a GPL licensed open-source product.

As of today we have implemented a long ago strategic decision to fully embrace the now proven open-source business model. Thus, we are no longer selling the CBSubs 2.0 proprietary licensed product and all existing CBSubs customers are highly recommended to migrate to the new GPL license.

We have put together a fair migration path for existing customers to migrate to the new CBSubs GPL product with unlimited users and unlimited sites and of course no longer needed ioncube loader (this migration promotion ends on Feb. 1st 2013):

• All existing or new Developer members get CBSubs GPL 3.0 as part of their subscription
• All existing CBSubs customer with lifetime maintenance can activate a free upgrade to a CBSubs GPL membership subscription
• All existing CBSubs customers with an active (as of today, Dec. 29th, 2012) maintenance period get a 75% discount to upgrade to CBSubs GPL 3.0
• All existing CBSubs customers with expired maintenance still get 50% off to upgrade to CBSubs GPL 3.0.

You can now get the new CBSubs GPL 3.0 release together with 12 months of maintenance and of course great forum support from the team experts by either purchasing a new CBSubs GPL membership subsciption or by becoming a Developer member.

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Details

Category: News

Published: 10 December 2012

Last Updated: 12 December 2012

Hits: 8621

Did you know you can program GroupJive to create new groups or categories and also automatically place or remove users in/from groups?

This is one of the many powerful features that GroupJive provides to help membership sites fulfill their use case needs.

Here is a list of sample use cases that can be easily programmed using a GroupJive Automation:

• Company website automatically adds customers to product groups based on items selected during the registration process
• Political website places constituents in groups based on the voting area they declared
• Dancing club members immediately join relevant dancing groups (Disco, Rock & Roll, Tango, etc) right after they express interest
• Dating sites use matching interest criteria to place members in similar interest groups

These are just a few of the infinite use cases that can be supported.

A tutorial supporting the Political website use case has been created here.

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Details

Category: News

Published: 31 October 2012

Last Updated: 24 November 2012

Hits: 10996

Joomla explicitly prohibits any two user accounts to use the same email address.

However, there are many community clusters that have a need to share and use a single email address. For example, church websites that want to support their constituents have issues with elderly members and families that typically do not have an email address for each individual.

Trying to modify Joomla (hacking) is not easy (no one has really succeeded) and is not recommended.

Creating a unique email address for each family member is an option that at least overcomes the (imo well justified) Joomla restriction. But in most cases this will just generate overhead for the Internet literate family member having for example to manage email address for other family members (elderly, infants, etc.).

>>> But there is a solution that does not hack Joomla and that makes things manageable also.

It is called email sub-addressing using +tag qualifier.

Most email servers support this (tested gmail, hotmail and our email server) little known cool feature.

How does it work?

Lets say you have an email address jonesfamily@example.com. With email sub-addressing the following email addresses are valid and of course unique for Joomla:

• jonesfamily+grandpa@example.com
• jonesfamily+grandma@example.com
• jonesfamily+babyboy@example.com

Any email sent to one of the above addresses will be delivered to the jonesfamily@example.com account but the to: address will retain the +tag part (so the email manager knows which tag was used).

Try it - it works and provides a great service for many communities that want to use Community Builder and Joomla for their websites and have hit the unique email address wall.

More about email and address tagging can be found on wikipedia.

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Details

Category: News

Published: 30 October 2012

Last Updated: 30 October 2012

Hits: 11909

Empowering your community with organic user groups and private forum discussions will boost member participation on your website.

Group members love the ability to privately discuss matters of common interest withing their own group environment. A group wall does not satisfy this need as there is no discussion threading and new unrelated posts will just push relevant posts further down in the wall activity stream.

Private discussion forums for GroupJive group members is just one of the great integrations available between Community Builder based solutions and the Kunena forum extension.

With the supported integration, every GroupJive group is automatically given its own private Kunena forum area that supports discussions between group members.

Non-group members will not see this area when browsing the Kunena forum.

This integration feature is discussed in the Private Group forums with GroupJive and Kunena tutorial in our Free tutorials section.

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Details

Category: News

Published: 27 September 2012

Last Updated: 02 October 2012

Hits: 21524

Executive Summary

The arrival of Joomla 3.0 and Community Builder 1.9 RC marks an important and exciting milestone for everyone in the community.

The built-in mobile support, the fresh new Twitter Bootstrap user interface and the jQuery support starts a new era for Joomla. Simply put, the Joomla 3.0 release opens the mobile door for all Joomla websites making them look, feel and operate equally well on all viewing devices (smartphone, tablets and traditional desktops).

Community Builder 1.9 is currently in Release Candidate (RC) status and available to all Professional and Developer members. It works with the new Joomla 3.0 and still maintains compatibility with all Joomla versions including 2.5, 1.5 and even Joomla 1.0. In addition, the new CB Bootstrap template (pro/dev members) also gives Community Builder a nice clean twitter bootstrap look.

And with CB 1.9 RC all our latest add-on, including CBSubs, are now Joomla 3.0 compatible.

Joomla 3.0 is a Short Term Support (STS) release and should be thought of as an early adaptors environment that paves the way for the next Long Term Support (LTS) Joomla 3.5 release scheduled for September 2013.

The new Joomla 3.0 features are great for new websites and Joomla 3.0 looks like a compelling upgrade for existings sites. However, before moving to Joomla 3.0, you should investigate if your extensions and your template are Joomla 3.0 compatible.

Simply put, most existing Joomla 2.5 extensions will not work with Joomla 3.0 and new releases of these extensions are needed.

Understanding Joomla releases

The chart tells the story, but for all practical purposes we can focus on 4 Joomla release series that are listed below in reverse chronological order (newest first):

• Joomla 3.0 STS
  This is the newest STS series that will pave the way for the next Joomla 3.5 LTS scheduled for September 2013.
  Who is this for?
  • Early adopters wishing to use new built-in and cutting edge features and
  • Sites with Joomla 3.0 compatible third-party extensions
• Joomla 2.5 LTS
  This is the current LTS series that will be supported (with security and bug point releases) at least until the end of 2013.
  Who is this for?
  • Stable existing websites or
  • Newly developed websites that want the longest possible hassle-free support period
• Joomla 1.5 LTS
  This is the last before Joomla 2.5 LTS release, which is officially supported until December 2012.
  Who is this for?
  • No one ahould develop a new website using Joomla 1.5.
  • All existing Joomla 1.5 environments should migrate to Joomla 2.5 or to 3.0 (depending on extension compatibility and willingness to follow the 3.X releases).
• Joomla 1.0 no longer supported
  If you still have a site using Joomla 1.0, you need to migrate to latest Joomla 2.5 or Joomla 3.0 asap as a matter of security. This will probably be much more than a migration as you will most likely want to redo your entire website and also find compatible extensions.

Bottom Line

The Joomla CMS is now properly addressing the very important smart-phone and tablet viewing environments. The new user friendly interface will attract more followers and the jQuery support will help developers port thousands of existing jQuery add-ons.

With such clear benefits, we believe third-party developers will quickly and enthousiatically support Joomla 3.0. Joomlapolis has already adapted all its extensions and CB addons to Joomla 3.0.

So, Joomla 3.0 is the best choice among the open-source CMS products.

Existing Joomla 2.5 websites should not rush to upgrade since many Joomla 2.5 extensions do not work yet on Joomla 3.0.

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