Blog

This is the time of the year that get all of us at JomSocial.com pretty excited, JomSocial Annual Trip! Every year, all of us would take several days off to 'recharge our batteries' and strengthen the bonds with our friends and families. This is to make sure that we can perform at our best throughout the year.

Last year, our destination is Bali and boy, we were having such a good time. This year, we decided to go to Phuket, Thailand! We have all the exciting beach activites lined up for us; snorkeling, boating, island hopping, jetskiing, and many more! The views there are awesome too. So be prepare for a lot of photos from us.

After several months of development we are glad to report that JomSocial 1.7.15 is now available for beta testing. This is another milestone in JomSocial development to bring more features, stability, security and ease of use to your community. There are a lot of features planned for 1.8 Stable release but here are what we've got so far:

Events - Your community member will be able to use JomSocial as a platform to organize events. Events can be set as private or public and you can use RSVP system to organize the attendance.

Application reordering - Community members have different values for each application. This new feature will allow them to sort more important ones at the top and leave the rest at the bottom.

We are happy to introduce a brand new way to enjoy JomSocial: JomSocial Hosted! JomSocial Hosted is an exciting new solution that combines the robustness of the Joomla CMS with the social networking power of JomSocial in an easy-to-set up, easy-to-use hosted solution.

We believe that Joomla and JomSocial, open source social networking software are a great team. And by offering them both as one hosted solution, there are lot of advantages for website owners--including a no-hassle/quick set-up time, award-winning hosting from Rackspace, exclusive JomSocial themes & extensions, and a great price, etc...but best of all, easy to use!

In keeping with our commitment to freedom, flexibility and openness, we are pleased to announce that the next version of JomSocial (1.8) will be completely 'open' and available under the GNU GPL license. We are confident that JomSocial users everywhere and the entire open source community will benefit greatly from this gesture and we're glad that we can fully align our hard work with the core values of Joomla and the open source community.

Just got back from Chicago today after attending the CMSExpo and I'm still smiling from ear to ear after JomSocial received the  "Best Joomla App" award! Wow...

CMS Expo 2010 and Web 2.0 Expo 2010 are commencing in a few hours. JomSocial have representatives for both events so don't forget to find us there.

I know everyone is getting excited about it so I'm here to spice things up. For a limited time, we are holding ReTweet contest for the events. One thing that make this contest interesting is that everyone is the winner! Follow these steps to get 20% off coupon sent directly to your twitter account. Below is the steps to enter the contest:

Mark your calendar! 2010 CMS Expo will be held in Evanston, IL from 3rd to 5th May. This highly-anticipated event will gather more than 60 experts in CMS from all over the world to share their experience and knowledge. This event will not be just about Joomla CMS. Other CMS like Wordpress, Drupal and Plone will be joining force to bring you all-in-one experience.

CMS Expo is not just about showcase, it will host a lot of useful learning tracks for each CMS. If you are still undecided on which CMS to be used in your next mega project, you will be glad to familiarize yourself with each option and meet the great minds behind it, all under one big roof. It's basically all-you-can-eat learning experience!

One of more often requests that we get is template customization. "how do I change this",  "how do I move this around", "I want to display this", "I don't want to display that".  While we have made some layout-related configuration available in the back-end, it is clearly not enough.

By and large, I have resisted the pressure to add more and more layout configurations within the JomSocial core options.  I always believe that the core JomSocial options should stay away from layout specific options.

Ning.com will will end its free social networking service and cut 70 people from its staff list.

This news may have come as a shock to Ning's free users, especially for non-profit and educational groups that have been relying on Ning for social networking solutions. It is effectively forcing users to become paid users or migrate elsewhere. But the bad news is, it's not that easy to migrate from Ning.

Ning's move seems like a betrayal to its users, who have spend countless hours into creating their social network, just to be disappointed under a promise of free service. This is not the first time Ning's users have been disappointed. In October 2008, Ning decided to close its REST API, making it harder for network admins to migrate their members outside of Ning.com.

I would like to post a quick update on the upcoming JomSocial 1.8. One of more interesting things about it is that it will be location-aware! We have worked hard to build a very easy to use, geo-location and mapping API right into JomSocial. Our location support will allow our plugins, or any 3rd party plugins to easily display maps, validate any address or perform radius search! Developing location-aware plugins will be a snap!

For example, if a valid address is specified in your newly created event (hint!), a Google map will be automatically displayed. You can also search if there is any new event, within say, 20 miles from where you are currently located. If you are a developer, you can then write a plugin that will email all site members who are within certain distance from where the event will be!

Application developers can also utilize our new API to make their apps location-aware. All they need to do is simply implement our geo-location class interface within their objects. Internally, all social objects within JomSocial will have support for location awareness!!