Note about Email Issues in Joomla and Community Builder
Issue
Many community sites such as churches and clubs focus on families and other groupings that share a common email address. For example at my church site, (
www.metunited.org
), we are trying to encourage all family members to take part in activities on the web site. In particular, we want to encourage them to use forums, post articles and community through the PMS and email with other members. The challenge is that many of the families share a common email. The number of seniors actively using the Internet has increased by more than 55 percent since 2004. They use the internet, but in general don’t have enough knowledge to make an email alias . This was not an issue in Joomla 1.0 but has been an issue since.
To get around that restriction on duplicate emails, and make their websites more user friendly, many web site developers have hacked Joomla and will likely have to hack updates to CB. This is a bad management practice because it discourages updates of the sites to the latest security standards.
Solutions
Preferred Solution
The CB team should engage with Joomla core members to discuss removing the restriction on duplicate emails. Obviously, this should be possible on a site-specific basis and would automatically disable the facility of logging in with an email address.
CB-Only Solution
Establish a default email field in the comprofiler table as a CB field, not created by users, which is separate from the email field in the Joomla User table. In the mail functions of CB, this field would be used if defined. If empty, the standard email field would be used for emails. If this was added to the API, it would be quickly adopted by all plug-ins that involve email.
Other Email Issues
Generating Fake Emails to Suit Joomla
CBJUICE can be used to load fake emails on bulk adds but this should be considered as a default option in CB.
Bulk Mailers
Many of us use a component CBMailer because of its ability to send emails to specific lists of CB users defined by the very powerful list facility. This component also has the virtue of being usable from the SITE side. The change should be implemented in that package if possible first. CB should consider incorporating such functionality including SITE access to the base CB package.
