Satisfaction Review.

I purchased the developer level membership from Community Builder with high expectations. My goal was to replace a several third party extensions with Community Builder add-ons, components and modules and templates. I have tried every which way from Sunday to replace the functionality of BT Login with the CB Login, I have been completely out of luck. I replaced OS Membership with CBSubs but was disappointed that CBSubs really does not have the capability to set up a store, you can sell a few items but a full scale store seems to be beyond the capability, I expected to replace Eshop with CBSubs as it states you can sell merchandise, I only needed to sell classes at an event (no shipping required, no inventory, etc.). There does not appear to be an events component to CBSubs my intention of replacing Event Booking was a non starter. Support was great, but even with support I could not implement most of my ideas or the functionality I required.

My overall idea was to create a dashboard in the back of a membership driven website that would allow the members to join events and pay for the classes in those events and manage their event records (not complete), and maintain their membership within the club (task completed), communicate among themselves (task completed), join groups for discussion (task completed), I really like groupJive and CB Gallery. Many Cb add-ons are pretty cool... loved all nicks videos too!

I am disappointed. I had hoped to narrow down my usage of extensions to just community Builder as I would have had less to manage in updates.

We can't possibly provide everything and our demo allows you to try all our products so I encourage everyone to test the limits of our products before making a decision and feel free to ask in pre-sales if clarification is needed.

CBSubs has never been advertised as a digital store. It has and always will be advertised as a subscription management system. Yes, it has merchandise plans that are essentially repeatable 1-off subscriptions but it in no way has a store front nor do we advertise anywhere that it does. The best way to have a storefront with CBSubs is to create the storefront using Joomla articles then simply have pay buttons that link to the basket page of a plan (you can find this URL at the top of the plan edit page or you can substitute it in). This should give you absolute control over how the storefront appears. We at this time do not have a way for a storefront to be generated and have no idea if we ever will.

As for an events plugin one is planned (should work like CB Gallery too.. events management anywhere!), but there are other higher priority tasks I have to deal with before I can start such a huge task of a new project. GJ Events is nicer than what it was before, but I doubt it's going to fill the shoes of an extension designed from the start as event management. I recommend just continuing to use Event Booking as it looks quite capable as an event management extension.

I've already commented in regards to BT Login. If you really want to still use it then continue to do so. You just won't be able to have anything act on CBs login triggers. Our modules are specifically and only designed after Joomlas default templates. Template developers need to make layout replacements for CBs modules if they want them to fit their design. If you need extra features like modal window login, etc.. that can also be done entirely in a layout override, but you'll have to code it.

Folks don't get caught up in trying to use only our products. There's a lot of other great Joomla developers and extensions out there. Sometimes it's just a matter of the wrong tool for the job (e.g. don't use a wrench when you need a hammer!). Trying to force CB and our products to do something they're not designed to do will simply frustrate you.

Thank you for your response. Community Builder is a great extension along with many of its add-ons and I am looking forward to the event booking when it becomes available. I had hoped it could solve one of my issues. I personally would rather buy a yearly membership to one robust extension than multiple extensions yearly. Limiting the number of extensions to manage for my application of Joomla seemed the logical process and I had hoped CB and its many add-ons was going to solve the issue for me. Perhaps it still can as your response has given me a new idea. The support has been exceptional. Thank You.

I agree using as few extensions as possible to accomplish any given task is usually the best approach as it's easier to maintain. Especially with our products since you can bundle a package of all the plugins you use into a single installer and suddenly maintaining your plugins becomes a 1 click process.

I've also looked further into the login issues. For CB 2.1 I'm going to look into allowing CB to process Joomla login POST data. We already block access to Joomla login using our system plugin, but if we can also process the POST you effectively could use whatever login module you wanted and it'd still fire CB login events. You of course wouldn't see CB Connect buttons in said modules, but at least the login process would work fine.

Still unsure what to suggest regarding events though unless you manually setup GJ Events then create subscriptions to block access to attending them or something of the sort.