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Category: News

Published: 01 July 2014

Last Updated: 03 July 2014

Hits: 7545

After our JAB14 return and our CB 2.0 new look article, we have pushing forward developing even more visual improvements and addressing community feedback on our CB 2.0 beta releases.

In the visual improvements area we have been restyling CB user lists to give them a new modern crisp look and to take advantage of the new Canvas functionality and the new Grid layout feature.

Our community has been expressing its concern that existing CB 1.9.1 compatible plugins may be broken by the next generation CB 2.0 series. Our initial thought was that the mangitute of new features and changes present in CB 2.0 would make it very difficult to maintain backwards compatibility and any existing plugins will have to be updated to conform.

Now that we have completed our core changes, we have been taking a closer look and decided to invest in providing an internal legacy layer to support existing CB 1.9.1 plugins. The ultimate goal is to allow CB 1.9.1 sites to upgrade to CB 2.0 and keep all existing CB plugins functional.

The benefit of this investment is huge for the existing CB 1.9.1 userbase and also for third-party CB plugin developers that will now have more time to convert their existing CB related add-ons to conform with the new CB 2.0 code.

We have also been implementing many localization improvements that will help improve performance and language specific string pluralizations and we have implemented multiple keys for language strings. This means that if the same string is used in two different areas it can be translated differently. We are now looking into implementing a translator friendly language override facility.

Because of these important code improvements we are now scheduling a beta 5 release in order to get feedback on legacy layer and CB plugin compatibility and then we will follow-up by addressing all reported issues and moving towards an RC release.

We are very excited with the progress and the huge potential and would like to THANK all our members for their support, feedback and patience.

Discuss this article on our forums.

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Category: News

Published: 11 June 2014

Last Updated: 11 June 2014

Hits: 11193

Now that we are back from #JAB14, we are working full speed on finalizing Community Builder 2.0 for RC release!

After our behind the scenes - do it right - library investments switching to Bootstrap and our new AHAWOW XML engine, it is time to start visualizing these improvements in our profile pages. CB 2.0 profiles now have 12 new canvas positions that let you create awesome looking user profile pages like the demo image included above!

And it plays nicely on mobile devices thanks to built-in image scaling and responsiveness.

The flexibility that has been implemented so far gives you the tools to make your community profile pages looks as awesome as you like.

Combining the new canvas positions and the already implemented in CB 2.0 beta 4 field layouts parameters gives you the power to style and configure things as you deem best for your specific community.

We have even built-in a mechanism so you can provide your own image library for your canvas images, in addition of course to allowing your users to upload their own canvas image that can also be marked to need CB Moderator approval.

As we are getting closer to the Community Builder 2.0 RC release, we would like to thank the Joomlapolis community for their support and continuous valuable feedback and of course their financial support as paid members.

Please note that this is work-in-progress and we cannot guarantee that the final product won't look even better and won't be even more flexible!

Discuss this on our forums.

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Category: News

Published: 02 June 2014

Last Updated: 03 June 2014

Hits: 4483

Another fantastic JandBeyond conference has ended and all attendees are now back to their home bases and daily routines.

This year's event was tagged as the "Investing in our future" conference and it was filled with awesome presentations about Joomla and about technologies used in other opensource environments.

But #JAB14 went far beyond just presentations as it dedicated half a day to conduct working sessions called Make It Happen (MIH) that contributed to bug squashing (see great bug squashing with music video), marketing brainstorming, frontend design, JUG organzations, Translator support and Joomla Certification program.

We participated in the marketing session, where we wrote next @joomla tweets and also worked on best ways to help people with older Joomla installations to migrate to newer ones. Beat also contributed by architecting and implementing a new software pattern for Joomla.

The JAB organization committee added a new social twist to this year's event by introducing the J-FACTOR talent show, where some community members dazzled us with their singing voices and musical instruments.

Beat and Nick delivered their presentations and have uploaded the relevant slides:

• Honey, I shrunk the code ! (software engineering and AHAWOW presentation)
• Make Joomla! THE solution for online documentation

Once again, we would like to send a big THANK YOU to everyone involved for helping Joomla Invest in our Future, as well as to the team that made JAB14 happen.

We have uploaded our JAB14 photos to the JandBeyond official photos gallery.

Thanks to our video sponsoring, the JAB video team is currently working to get all the recorded sessions online for the whole world to enjoy!

The first videos are already available and we will be showcasing these great presentations in our upcoming reports.

Discuss this on our forums.

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Category: News

Published: 26 May 2014

Last Updated: 27 May 2014

Hits: 7189

Community Builder 2.0 was presented during a 1 hour presentation at Joomla! Day France this weekend.

Beat, compiled a great presentation in French to highlight the differences bewtween CB 1.9.1 and the next generation CB 2.0 series.

The comprehensive huge list of new features and the new XML MVC AhaWow engine technology was discussed during the session and was very well received by the audience.

The new features that were presented are:

• new look and feel everywhere with new styles and a clean and crisp user experience
• 6 new core field-types: file, video, rating, points (substantially improved compared to existing add-ons), and brand new audio and date/time
• image field type now supports moderation and approval via CB Workflow module
• new built-in avatar gallery with full view and thumbnail view support
• 3 new core plugins: CB Articles, CB Blogs and CB Forums (re-written for new look and feel and performance improvements)
• CB Bootstrap template (previously commercial and also improved) is now included in core and is default for new installations
• all CB templates are now bootstrapped (default, winclassic, webfx, osx, dark, luna)
• HTML email support now added to all workflow email messages
• new administration module provides backend admin menu, CB news feed and CB plugin update feed
• enhancements to CB field manager with ability to copy fields and change field types
• CB fields can now be configured to turn-off profile editing (backend only editing)
• all CB fields now support profile layout, userlist layout, Profile edit and Registration layout flexible output configuration in addition to the traditional label: value layout
• tabbed and flat views can be applied to profile editing and registration forms
• optional public emailing to profile user
• new flexible layout types for user lists: grid and div
• user lists manager has been enhanced to allow copying of user lists
• improved SEO with new framework functions to add active menu item metadata to HTML header output and respect/use Joomla metadata on all CB landing pages
• new single Joomla package automatically installs everything for you and even publishes / pre-configures modules during first-time installation

There are of course many more features under the CB 2.0 hood that can be seen on our CB 2.0 forge area.

The presentation slides are available here.

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Category: News

Published: 07 May 2014

Last Updated: 07 May 2014

Hits: 3458

 Joomla Day France 2014 is taking place in Paris on the 23rd and 24th of May and JandBeyond 2014 is happening in Germany between May 30th and June 1st and CB Team members will be attending and presenting in both events.

Beat will be speaking in French and presenting Community Builder 2.0 in France. This is a great opportunity for all our French community builders to meet Beat in person and natively discuss any Joomla or Community Builder topic of interest.

Both Beat and Nick will be attending this year's JandBeyond event which is being sponsored by Joomlapolis for the fifth concesutive year!

Beat will be presenting a session on the new XML MVC AhaWow engine technology (used in CBSubs and CB 2.0) humoristically titled "Honey, I Shrunk the Code" and Nick will be motivating the Joomla community to "Make Joomla THE solution for online documentation".

If you are able to attend JAB14. make sure you flag down Beat and Nick for a beer and a discussion session. If you are not able to attend, you will still be able to view the presentations courtesy of our Joomlapolis Video sponsoring.

We are also assisting and gift sponsoring the Joomla Social Conference 2014 in Budapest, Hungary. This is not an official Joomla conference but it is very interesting as it is focused on the use of Joomla for social networking and community building. A Community Builder session is scheduled to present CB related social newtworking features and we are working with the presenters to assist them with the presentation preparation.

The CB Team is always available to assist Joomla User Groups to promote Joomla and Community Builder solutions to their users. Any JUG representative may contact us to discuss how we can help them spread the Joomla love.