NYCPHP Meetup

[Gary Mort]

On Sat, Nov 20, 2010 at 1:28 PM, Herb Tucker <htucker at covenanttek.com>wrote:

> Hi All,
> I've been evaluating Community Builder and JomSocial and I would love to
> hear from anybody who has used either extension and what you think the
> better extension is.
>

Community Builder was "the" user profile extension when I first started, 4
years ago?  With Joomla 1.0.

Over time though, CB has not kept up with the times and it's expansion has
gone in directions I'm not thrilled with.  The main issue I have is CB is
built to be cross platform for Mambo, Joomla 1.0 and Joomla 1.5.  As such it
does not take advantage of the Joomla API and rerolls a lot of functions
that are built into Joomla - such as sanitizing html input and it has it's
own event/plugin system rather than re-using the Joomla API.

As a coder, this means I have to learn 2 distinct systems, Joomla and CB,
for no appreciable gain.

Add to this that CB does not have an API into their system[simple things
like retrieving user information should be possible with a decent API
similar to Joomla's] and at the end of the day I am no longer a fan of CB.

JomSocial seems from the outside to have made a lot of good decisions, it is
more up to date, and better integrated.  I have not perused their code, so I
can't really say if I am happy with it or not, but given a choice with
someone else paying the bill and I'd go with JomSocial.


> I'm primarily interested in extending the user registration form to gather
> more info on registered users, integrate the user's list from Joomla to an
> email app such as MailChimp, iContact or Campaign Manager and some type of
> events manager. The client wants a single user registration that will sync
> to the email opt in and access to events.
>

Never ever ever migrate TO iContact.   iContact is fine as an ESP, better
than many in fact, but part of the reason they are better than many is that
they do not trust their clients existing subscriber lists and require all
subscribers to double opt in through their system.  Generally you lose
between 10% and 75% of your subscriber base if you require them to re-opt
in.  Industry average is around 30%.

MailChimp takes the approach of "trust first, big stick second" - so they
will trust you, but if there are an obscene number of spam complaints after
migrating they will shut you down[this can happen because people might have,
rather than unsubbing, put the current mail server on a block list....so out
of 1000 people, 100 of them might no longer be receiving email because they
'opted out' by blocking.  When you switch to a new email service, those 100
people will get the email again suddenly and if they all mark it as spam,
you have a 10% spam reporting rate....  Mailchimp is fully aware of this, so
for the first few sends they will assume a slightly higher than average rate
and will clean stuff off.]

Not sure about Campaign Manager...

In the end, I've not been thrilled with how any of the Email Service
Providers integrate with Joomla or any other CMS as you end up having 2 user
lists which are very disjointed.  For that reason, I'm actually setting up
my own ESP for myself, and can allow others to use it for moderate rates if
your interested.   It's for moderate email senders[under a million per
month] who don't require email template design handholding.

**blatant self promotion***
My purpose is I want a system where when someone unsubs, the user directory
in the CMS gets updated with that data.  That way if you have requirements
that people must subscribe in order to access the site, you can extend the
notification rules to flip the switch.

I also want to use the same system for system notices[password changes, new
forum posts, etc] so that one can view tracking information on those
posts[do you REALLY want to be sending out 1000 "new forum post" messages a
day if no one ever opens them?  And by the same token, if people DO open
them, your passing up the chance to place banner and tower ads in those
notifications to either cross promote other sites or services or have a
residual income stream]

It's almost ready for beta, so if your interested feel free to contact me.
 I figure rates will be about on par with Mailchimp.....so it is on the high
side for the lack of Mailchimps other advanced features, but it has a
different advanced feature set for CMS integration.
 ***end blatant self promotion***

-Gary
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