JomSocial is a social publishing platform for Joomla! content management system. It allows you to connect with friends, integrate videos, follow users' activity stream, share photos, create groups, and customize your brand.

JomSocial is an out-of-the-box extension that enables a Joomla! website administrators to set up a social network with ease, and customize it to meet the needs of a site. By the end of the book, the reader will have built a good looking, fully functional social networking site using this hands-on guide.

Social networks have become ubiquitous in the 21st Century and have changed the way we communicate. No longer used to simply keep in contact with friends, they are used by multimillion dollar businesses to promote new products, discuss the latest ideas, and receive customer feedback on a much more informal platform.

This practical tutorial will guide the reader through the installation of JomSocial on a Joomla! platform, to configure it for complete integration with Joomla!, and help to walk through processes for integrating other key Joomla! plugins into JomSocial as applications for interaction in an online social networking environment. The guide wraps it all up by hooking up our JomSocial-enabled social network with Facebook and Twitter using identifiable Joomla! modules

What you will learn from this book

• Customizing user profile by adding extra fields
• Changing your avatar and other images or graphics to enhance the look of your site
• Setting profile permissions and determining privacy settings to control the privacy of your site
• Setting preferences for user activities
• Customizing user activity by adding JomSocial plugins
• Inviting friends on other networks
• Increasing your sites visibility by integrating your Facebook account into your Joomla! social network
• Creating Blogs, Discussions, Gallery, Videos, Events
• Creating and managing groups
• Customizing the template to control the way your social network looks
• Tips and tricks to enhance the social network

Approach

A practical guide, this book provides step-by-step instructions for building your social networking system, showcasing real-world examples throughout.

Who this book is written for

This book is for individuals or institutions desiring to develop a social networking system using the Joomla! content management system. It is suitable for both the novice and the advanced Joomla! user. There is no need for scripting or programming knowledge. All that is required is enthusiasm and the determination to implement a project.