JomSocial from Azrul: Joomla Extension for Social Networking

Over the years, we've provided development services to many communities, including websites, email blast services, and membership systems. We're currently in the process of evaluating the new social networking extension for Joomla called JomSocial, developed by Azrul.

Contact us for help with your JomSocial development needs today!

Why JomSocial?

There appears to be a strongly felt need for a social networking extension for Joomla, beyond the currently available extensions. One example of an existing extension is Community Builder. Community Builder is used on many sites, including the Joomla Chicago site.

JomSocial highlights

From our first experience on the JomSocial dev site, we discovered that:

• Any Facebook user will be very comfortable using JomSocial and will get a lot done very quickly. They will intutively be able to set up their profile, upload a picture of themself, find people they already know in the community, send invitations to additional people and encourage them to join, join groups . . . and even set up one or more groups of their own! (One of our first steps was to set up a group so we could work closely with other people evaluating JomSocial who would be going to the CMS EXPO in Denver in December.)


• The "secret sauce" is immediate gratification. JomSocial is fun to use because it has lots of ajax elements that "talk" to you and make you feel like you're interacting with a live organism. So far, this has been successful in stimulating a pretty good size community on the dev site. It remains to be seen whether JomSocial's messaging elements provide the irresistible feedback that will make it a "killer app" . . . . .

Ease of use -- a frictionless application -- is key. It's far less important to have a mammoth "feature list" than it is to make the central elements of the application smooth as silk. After using JomSocial for a short while, we could see why there are already about 1,000 people participating in the dev community, actively plucking away at it. It's fun!

Within days of the JomSocial dev site's launch, a group formed with over 100 people in it under the name "Release JomSocial Now!" As one member wrote, "I need the beta so baaaad right now! Pleeeeeease . . . ?"

Taking JomSocial for a test drive

In late November, we installed a trial version of JomSocial, and and made it available to a select group of testers (n=300), as the basis for a "Evanston Entrepreneurial & Technology Community."

Initial observations:

• The initial install went smoothly, except that our blogs became disabled (horrors!). (The blog module is MyBlog, supplied by Azrul, as is JomSocial.) As a correction, we had to uninstall the plugin "Azrul.com System Mambot" and reinstall MyBlog
• As expected, we had to spend some time to adjust our standard site template to accomodate the page layout of the JomSocial pages. (Our site layout is somewhat non-standard, using a narrow center section.
• JomSocial relies on the "user" section of the core Joomla CMS for its member roster.
• Internal users were immediately able to set up profiles and initiate groups.
• Within 1/2 hour of initial invitation, a half-dozen additional users had set up profiles, begun friending people, etc. Those users were given no instructions other than the URL. (All of them are seasoned Facebook users.)

The "Evanston Entrepreneurial & Technology Community" will be an open community, and, assuming initial user experience continues to be smooth, we will publicize the link in 3 or 4 days.

Getting your feet wet with JomSocial

What to see a real, live JomSocial (beta) site in action? Visit the "Evanston Entrepreneurial and Technology Community". Please register and explore. This is a site that Arc has set up in a continuing effort to promote networking within the vibrant Evanston community.

For more information about JomSocial and related topics . . .

JomSocial will be introduced by Azrul at CMS Expo in Denver on December 4-5.

For additional updates on JomSocial, see all the JomSocial blog posts on this site.

Azrul is the developer of such products as MyBlog (which this blog is written on). We've found extremely strong interest in MyBlog among the Web 2.0 community, with a strong stream of visitors to the review of MyBlog on the Joomla Chicago site.

For more on web development for social media and social networking, see the Social Networking section of this site.

Ready to jump in to JomSocial? Contact us and tell us how we can help you use JomSocial to meet your social networking needs today!