Best combinations of CB, GroupJive, Kunena, PM, Social Networks and other add-ons (& J3.0)!

Hi All
In the last few months I've been prototyping a private/internal site at a big university for just its students and staff to discuss and develop project ideas amongst each other. The intention is to make the whole thing much more fun and socially-oriented than the university's existing corporately structured internal VLE system (Blackboard).

Of course I have picked CB and GroupJive as the main system to provide me with the framework and I've been watching closely the developments of the CB Quickstart PRO pack and the recent announcements of the Joomla 3.0 support, cleaner Bootstrap templates and the integration with Kunena and its private group messaging are all interesting developments.

So far all my experimentation has been in Joomla 2.5. In the next day or so I'm about to embark on rebuilding the site from scratch and I'm contemplating using Joomla 3.0 as I feel it will give the project a good start into the new era of where things are going, what with better integration with mobile devices, social networks, refined layouts, etc., etc.

It doesn't matter if things aren't quite yet functioning perfectly in J3.0 and related software, but I would like to ask a few questions of anyone here who might be able to offer a few bits of advice:

Q1: The recent Joomlapolis newsletters have variably mentioned integration with Kunena and it's private group message forums, also in the newsletter I just received tonight, the suggestion is J3.0 compatibility and integration with the uddeIM Private Messaging, however, neither Kunena or it's private messaging integration, or uddeIM mention anything about J3.0 support. The Joomlapolis newsletters keep saying how all the CB stuff is now 3.0 compatible, and all the other extensions I was planning on using also all now support 3.0, but am I holding out too much hope that Kunena/uddeIM for J3.0 will be available any time soon? - Should I just be sticking with j2.5 for now? The site needs to be up and running by mid January 2013. Might the developers of those integrations be interested in prototyping/beta testing J3.0 components with me if they are nearing completion?

Q2: Assuming a good server, can Joomla/CB/GroupJive/Kunena/uddeIM, etc., cope with potentially thousands of students interacting with each other, uploading images, downloading files, messaging each other and writing on forums, etc., all on a lively site. Or would it be best to limit the quantity of data they can store, use, upload? E.g. I notice in various parts of GroupJive that videos, images, etc. can be uploaded, or is this just asking for trouble in terms of site speed and usability? The site currently resides on its own managed VPS so I'm hoping it will have some capacity and security to start growing from.

Q3: Facebook and Twitter integration (and maybe other social networks/image sites/etc), I haven't ever really tried these myself yet, let alone linked into them with a CB installation, so I'm a little unsure of the steps involved or whether I can maintain the all important element of keeping this site private and just for internal use by students and staff of the university. I'm hoping with CB and all the wonderful Add Ons this will all be fairly straight forward. i.e. only Facebook friends with university email addresses will be able to use the site to log in to so others won't get beyond the first login page. - Am I on the right lines with this thought?! It doesn't matter if all Facebookees can see any content on Facebook itself, they're just not allowed to get into the university (Joomla/CB) site if they follow any links.

Q4: Logging in with university based email addresses. I won't have access to the ever-changing database that contains all the university email addresses, but can anyone suggest a safe and easy way to only allow registration to users with a qualifying email address? i.e. the staff and students all have a university email address, so as long as they respond to the registration confirmation email from a suitable @someuniversity.ac.uk address then they'll be registered, but how might I cross-check that the bit after the @ symbol is correct and approved (and not spoofed/faked)- Is there a CB plug in for that?

Sorry this forum post is so long, I can't seem to write short questions! Any suggestions or advice gratefully received. Many thanks.

Q1.

It's true CB and all our plugins are J3.0 ready. However, you will find many extensions are not. Kunena and UddeIM both do not support J3.0 yet.

If you need your site live by January then it's probably best to use J2.5 until other extensions you plan to use are J3.0 compatible. J2.5 to J3.0 is an upgrade and not a migration so it's not hard to upgrade (1-2 clicks from backend actually).

Q2.

Yes, we've over 400,000 users here and CB is going strong. You should have a dedicated server with redundant backups based off your needs though to ensure the site remains live with little to no interruption if a problem should occur. You like will need to add custom database indexes based off your most used queries to further improve performance.

GJ does not allow Video Uploads, to do so would require a massive video processing library; you simply link videos from outside sources such as YouTube. This allows users to add videos without it putting a performance burden on your server as video processing is large resource hog.

Q3.

CB Connect (you're professional, you don't need FBC/TC) lets the user register and login in 1-2 clicks with their social site credentials. You can however make it so users can only Link their accounts. What this does is link their existing CB account with the social site account allowing them to now login easily with their Facebook credentials for example. This could then be used to display Facebook Social Plugins or Twitter Widgets on their profile for example. I don't really recommend it to for a school site to be honest.

Q4.

Edit the email field in CB > Field Management and set "Authorized input:" to "Custom PERL regular expression" then set "Perl Regular Expression:" to "/^\w+@someuniversity.ac.uk$/" (without quotes). This will ensure the user can only register with an email address ending in @someuniversity.ac.uk. You can also enable admin approval so a site moderator has to approve a users registration. You can also use CB DB Lookup Fieldtype plugin to check a student ID number against a database table to validate that they're a student.

Thanks for that Kyle, very useful information. It sounds like I'm on the right track then!

Q1: I guess J2.5 it is then. I was hoping J3.0 would get me off to a good start with better layouts and mobile device integration now, rather than have to reconsider those things later. Maybe there's not a lot of difference?

Q2: Great to hear CB & Joomla can cope with big numbers. I'd misunderstood the GJ video tab, linking rather than uploading makes much more sense now re server loads. Thanks for mentioning the need for a dedicated server with redundant backups, I shall let them know of the need as things progress, for now I hope to start of with the VPS and should be able up-scale easily later.

Could you slightly expand on (or suggest a link) for what you said about custom database indexes which I didn't quite understand (think you left a word or two out?) "You like will need to add custom database indexes based off your most used queries to further improve performance.", i.e. Where/how does a "custom db index" happen and how does one determine "most used queries"?

Q3: Thanks for the clarifications re CB Connect versus FBC/TC. I shall experiment and take your advice gladly.

Q4: Email checking: That's great info for the "Authorized input" to check the email address. My only problem with the rest of your security checks is that for the university's own security, I probably wouldn't be able to access their databases for student ID numbers, and as the students are constantly changing it would be tricky keeping such a list updated. Also moderator approval does have its limitations in that users might get put off from progressing by having to wait until someone approves things. - It's a great idea and I assume that these two extra ideas are your suggestion for ensuring no fake registrations get through.

I wonder if there are any other ways to avoid fake/spoofed email registrations (if that's a real problem at all)? I noticed in WHM/cPanel account setup for domains that there is something called DKIM & SPF (DomainKeys Identified Mail, and Sender Policy Framework), I'm not entirely familiar with what these are and how to use them, but they are something to do with email verification. Might these provide an answer to confirm origin of sender emails or has anyone any further suggestions on how to beef up email verification security? Or maybe it's not as big a problem as I'm thinking it could be?

Many thanks

Q1.

Well you can use J3.0, but just keep in mind there's a good bit of extensions that won't work on it. If you're depending on Kunena or UddeIM then you'll have problems as neither work on J3.0 yet. I can't say when they will as I have no clue (I'm not the developer of said extensions). J2.5 doesn't have that great of responsive design, but that's easily worked around by using a good 3rd party template. There's plenty of Bootstrap templates available that provide responsive design that work on J2.5.

Q2.

VPS should be fine for now, but once you hit the 200,000+ userbase range you'll want to beef it up.

Q4.

Your best bet in this case is to just check the email address. Just enable email confirmation and that'll stop fake emails. They'll basically get an email with a click link to confirm their account.

Q1: Templates - I've heard of this term "Bootstrap" templates but still not really sure what it all means other than it's something to do with the new responsive design theory and Twitter styling?

To date on some sites I've designed I've been using Rocket Theme templates which seem amazing in what they can do and how they automatically adjust layout for phones and touchpads.

Do you know if Rocket Theme templates is a good safe and easy way to go or is there a specific type of "Bootstrap" templates I should be looking for?

Q2: Oh good, 200,000+ userbase. I should be fine for a while then.

Many thanks.

Templates - I've heard of this term "Bootstrap" templates but still not really sure what it all means other than it's something to do with the new responsive design theory and Twitter styling?

It's a standardized HTML and CSS styling usage with responsive design. Responsive design means you design once and it works on various display sizes all the way down to mobile. You can find out more below.

twitter.github.com/bootstrap/

The issue extensions don't have to respect Joomla styling and often don't so you could have extensions that look really bad on mobile devices.

Do you know if Rocket Theme templates is a good safe and easy way to go or is there a specific type of "Bootstrap" templates I should be looking for?

Probably, I've no experience with 3rd party templates. You can however get a discount on their templates from being a professional subscriber. You can find various professional subscriber promotions at the below link.

www.joomlapolis.com/promotions