Hi guys

I have a site using K2, Comunity Builder, Kunena and Tienda on a Grid2 template. After a weekend of trouble shooting I am starting to think that there are too many things causing too many issues. My question is has Community Builder had its day?

I say this respectfully, i have long been a fan of CB - i have been a subscriber for ages and produced a bunch of sites using it... BUT... 2 significant extensions, Tienda and K2 don't integrate directly and don't appear to have plans to. I know there are a whole bunch of ways to bring it all together but there is no cohesion.

What are the other options to tie everything together?

Cheers
Iain

Well thats a pretty good question really.

I think Cb can be a good solution if you just need to be able to use a single page to display more user profile information - sort of what we have done here. but it definitely has a reputation for being an unwieldy codebase and is definitely overkill in a lot of circumstances.

In saying that I think solutions like Jomsocial are overkill too in most cases.

Interesting about Tienda and K2 - wasn't aware of that official stance but it makes sense unless CB steps up a bit and moves more into 2010 and beyond.

My two cents anyway.

Anthony

I think you have nailed it - "steps up to 2010" - was what I was thinking. (I cant understand why they still use Two Shoes M-Factory on their site. 5 years out of date. the default styling on CB is woeful). To clarify - not sure if that *is* the official stance from K2 & Tienda - certainly nothing on the Tienda roadmap (even though they reference JoomSocial intergration). K2 has several references on the forum but it doesn't seem to be on the radar - and that's what prompted this post.

So we have custom profile info in CB - this data does read across to K2 profiles or to Tienda Profile
We have published K2 content - the avatars from CB don't read across to K2 profiles
Tienda doesn't have a CB plugin so the user can't see their orders in their profile resulting in users having to go to separate areas to see their info. This results in an inconsistent and frustrating user experience me thinks.

Think my solution may lie in clever use of Menus and links

Interested in what folk think,

Yeah what we did was use some ajax to pull in the html from the AEC page into CB for instance. It's the main reason why that page loads a little slowly but I think its worth it from a functionality point of view.

My wish list is really an easy way to display different component views in a tabbed interface that combines profile information. That would really be ideal.

"My wish list is really an easy way to display different component views in a tabbed interface that combines profile information. That would really be ideal."

That's it, sitting right there - is the answer to SOOO many problems - I'm pretty sure that would fit in with the lads over at dioscouri.com... they already have Ambra User Manager, and Tienda of course. Have a word next time you happen to be speaking to them will you mate???

Well its amazing what happens when you start talking about something.

Here is what I ebelive to be the solution:

www.jomexperts.com/download/cat_view/40-modules.html

Basically cleanly loads a component view in a module.

So you can load up any of the views you want to via the module and display them in tabs or whatever markup you want using the loadposition syntax or just simply load them in a tabbed module module.

I guess the only thing missing now is a good uniform avatar that can be used across the site. Worth looking into for sure.

Anthony

that is interesting. here's the demo page - Kunena forum is loading above the frontpage.

www.demo.jomexperts.com/

Got to figure out how best to tie it together. I guess the main problem though is the separate profiles. If you have registered in CB then details do not cross over to Tienda. I am wondering whether a possibility could be revert to the Joomla default login/possibly the Ambra User Manager login (as that will tie in better with Tienda) then use the above component to display everything else. Shop purchases, forum posts etc.

Anyone ever done something like this?

Yeah I was thinking the avatar could come from gravatar or grab it from CB or Tienda via some code.

I guess that solution would be something like getting an extended user profile manager - there are a few on the JED - and then weaving them in together. But I havent used Tienda on a production site so I dont quite know here it grabs its profile info from. I guess conceivably you could have a second tab - eg user profile - shop profile.

Good to brainstorm this as Im going to try and drop CB when the JB site incarnates again.

Cheers Anthony