So far Community Builder has proven to be an excellent component and a must have for anybody who wants to create a social network using Joomla. However its templating possibilities are limited at the moment and almost every CB site looks the same.  This alone has been enough to put many potential users off and cause them to abandon Joomla in favor of one of the many commercial social networking scripts.   There is also a commercial component for Joomla currently in development that looks like it will include everything CB is missing called Joomunity. 

This modification to CB helps overcome some of its current limitations and allows for far greater profiling possibilities. At the time of writing this article I have not seen any other CB websites using this modification so hopefully the profile layout on this site will be useful to you as a good example of what’s possible.  

I am also using the customizetab plug-in from Voodootools on JoomlaPlazza which allows individual users to customize their profile colors and background styles.  I feel there is a lot of potential when using the extended profile and the customizetab in combination. The possibities are almost endless and in theory you should be able to create user profiles that are a match for any of the big social networks such as Bebo!  However I am still working on integrating the customizetab plug-in with my extended profile layout and the overall Joomla template.

This modification is using code originally created by Chuck on the Joomlapolis forums. I take no credit for this; I’m simply aiming to show you its potential and how to implement the modification.

I noticed some people were having difficulties getting it working so I have included working versions of the files in the download section.

The following code comes with absolutely no warranty and is released as GNU GPL