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.
We have been working very intensely to prepare the following items:
· CB Privacy plugin – This plugin extends all CB fields and tabs allowing end-users (profile owners) to chose if a field or tab is viewable to public, registered members, connected members (per connection type) or if the field/tab is not viewable at all on profile. It will even allow fields/tabs to be marked as viewable only for connections of connected members. This plugin will be described in detail in a follow-up article and it will also be installed on Joomlapolis for Joomlapolitans to get a hands-on front-end experience. This CB Team plugin will be available for download to all our documentation subscribers.
· CB Rating field plugin – This plugin extends the available CB field types adding a rating field type that can be used to create Ajax-powered CB fields. An article presenting this plugin will be prepared and Joomlapolitans will also be able to see this in action in their profiles very soon. This plugin was developed by JoomlaJoe (CB founder) and will be available for download to all our documentation subscribers.
· CB Activities plugin – This plugin allows users to see what their connections have been doing. Profile owners will be able to see what their connections have been doing, which changed their image, which modified a profile value, etc. This will also combine nicely with the privacy plugin. A detailed article will be published regarding this work in progress and Joomlapolitans will also be able to see this in action on their Joomlapolis profile. This CB Team plugin will be available for download to all our documentation subscribers.
· MyCommunity template – The CB Team has stated many times that there are many css classes and tab positions that can be used to change the entire look of CB via proper template construction. Well, in cooperation with Jacob (our Joomlapolis template designer), we have designed and implemented a new Joomla & CB template named “MyCommunity” which will be offered commercially very soon. A preview article is in preparation.
· GroupJive update – The next Groupjive component version will use the CB API, thus providing better integration with CB and also becoming Joomla/1.0.X/1.5.X and Mambo native. More about this should be posted soon on the groupjive site by stiggi and his team.
· Hosting – The CB Team has been preparing and testing a new “high-availability” hosting service that has been fine-tuned to work with Joomla and CB. The service is for high-performance fully redundant website needs and uses concepts and techniques that have been deployed and tested (Joomlapolis is using a similar environment). Details regarding the actual offering will be posted in an upcoming article.
· CB Paid Subscription system – This has been in the works for over a year now and we are finally reaching an RC state. We plan to release this by end of this year. There will be a detailed feature list and description posted in an upcoming article along with commercial details. This system will most likely change the entire Joomla – ecommerce landscape. Stay tuned …
· CB 1.2 Public Release – Our goal is that a public release of CB 1.2 (RC4 or stable) will take place on December 6th, 2008. CB Team plugins (profilebook, cbgallery, autowelcome, last visitor) will follow - first in RC status for documentation subscribers and once stable, they will also be publically released.
The presentation given by Beat can be seen here. As you can see it has some nice screen-shots regarding CB and “work-in-progress” items. German speaking Joomlapolitans can see an overview of the presentation here. As mentioned in the beginning of this article, this is the first of many important and exciting announcements ... so keep tuned!
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