More about Joomla Privacy Suite and Community Builder

With the release of Joomla 3.9 millions of Joomla powered websites finally had a solution to cope with the European Union General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

The major feature of this Joomla release is the Privacy suite. In simple terms, the privacy suite features provide the following functionality:

1. Getting user consent when your recording their data (new registrations, existing registartions and periodic consent renewal)
2. Managing user requests to provide users with their data and/or remove their data from your website
3. Logging user activities that result in more user data gathering on your website (with API for other Joomla extensions to push their related activities to the log)

With the release of Community Builder 2.4, the CB registration process integrates with the Joomla user consent capturing process.

The integration process is managed by publishing the params field (User Parameters) field to appear on the CB Registartion form (from the CB Field Manager). This simple move will reveal the Joomla privacy policy consent question on the CB Registration form.

Managing user requests and viewing user activity logs are reached from Joomla privacy dashboard and CB website can use this functionality just fine - remember CB users are also Joomla users.

Exporting CB related user data can be performed from the CB User Management administrative page utilizing the new CB 2.4 user import/export feature.

Finally, the CB 2.4 terms and conditions fieldtype improvements now track user consent (the date user accepted) and you can also force users to accept terms and condition field before they can complete there login session to fully browse your site. In other words, you don't really need to use the Joomla privacy policy / concent process at all. It's your choice ;-) ! And there is an extra bonus if you use CB terms and conditions -- you can have more than one (actually unlimited) terms and conditions fields active at the same time -- all requiring acceptance before letting users continue.

All of these features are built-in to our free Community Builder, but there are also several paid Add-ons that can help website administrators put in place even better GDPR processes and automations.

We will be following up on this in a new article next week ... so stay tuned ;-)