Dear JomSocial Support,

I am new to this (all of it) and i have a few questions regarding your product.
I am doing the joomla-siteground partnership demo in order to try out Joomla. I would like continue to use this service free of charge for another 60 days. I choose Joomla because research told me that it was the best available cms for a social networking site. After researching more I discovered you guys. I have visited your site several times and I think finally some questions are coming up that are still not clear to me:

- Is it possible to change the registered domain with JomSocial? I am not sure that I will use the same domain when I upgrade my hosting account.
- I am interested in creating a site similar to your front end demo of JomSocial. Its looking like you guys are coming on top for the best template to do that (nice!), I noticed a question in your FAQ that concerns me: Is is possible to create a membership based site? What do you mean by membership, does this mean my community members won’t be able to create a profile/membership? Or is this question specifically referring to “paid membership?”

I want to make sure that I understand the investment it will take to get a site similar to your demo. Can you please provide more insight on this?

Kind regards,

Harry

Hi Harry,

Thanks for getting in touch with us,

- Is it possible to change the registered domain with JomSocial? I am not sure that I will use the same domain when I upgrade my hosting account.

When you purchase Jomsocial it includes support for one domain. and "you" the user can only enter your domain once. The reason we do this is some people were purchasing Jomsocial and wanting support for multiple domains. We let you install the product on an unlimited amount of sites but support is only one site.

What this means to you with your "one site" is that when you first set it up on on your hosting provider and decide you want to move it to another then another or change the domain name many times. This is all ok and we will happily change the supported domain to follow your site. Why? because it is the same site. The only time we have an issue with changing supported domains is if you create a dating site then 3 months later create a site that's about cars. That's a second site and you need another license for the cars site.

- I am interested in creating a site similar to your front end demo of JomSocial. Its looking like you guys are coming on top for the best template to do that (nice!), I noticed a question in your FAQ that concerns me: Is is possible to create a membership based site? What do you mean by membership, does this mean my community members won’t be able to create a profile/membership? Or is this question specifically referring to “paid membership?”

What we mean by membership / subscription is you cannot create a site and sell member subscriptions (eg: access to your site for $40 for 6 months) Your members can signup and create profiles and use the site entirely but you are not able to charge them using Jomsocial out of the box. What does exist and has a huge user base is a product called payplans www.readybytes.net/payplans.html the products from these guys works great with Jomsocial and we have many users that use their products to make their site a paid subscription service.

I want to make sure that I understand the investment it will take to get a site similar to your demo. Can you please provide more insight on this?

To get a site similar to our demo demo.jomsocial.com you would need Jomsocial and a joomla site template. here is an example.
Jomsocial comes as a default plain style how you see it on our demo. we then use a joomla site template, the one on the demo is yootheme.com/demo/joomla/nano3 which lets you style the modules and menu of the site, There are some template providers that specifically write templates for us here are a few examples

Our own socialize.jomsocial.com/
Gavick Pro www.gavick.com/joomla-templates/tag,social.html
Bow themes demo.bowthemes.com/#bt-education

There are many more but those are a good example to the difference in our demo site with a joomla template and Jomsocial out of the box look, compared to a complete template that also styles Jomsocial

lastly

I am new to this (all of it)

Yup , fun times and heaps of learning to do, here are some tips that have nothing to do with Jomsocial and one day may save you days of work
Find yourself a good hosting company, the one you mentions is one of them :) hosting that is ridiculously cheap is well...... ridiculous. At some pointwhen your site is a success it will come back and haunt you.

The next thing is backups while your host may offer them there is something i believe you must do. Get yourself a copy of Akeeba backup. They have a free version which will do the job but to be honest it is worth every cent to buy it. i can backup a joomla site and restore it anywhere in about 2 minutes. To me its like running a windows PC without any virus protection. you can do it but i wouldn't :)

When you purchase extensions do what you have done here and make sure that if you have Jomsocial and lets say the bow theme installed, ask the extension developer if it will work with those products. Things can get messy when a template or extension will not work with Jomsocial. While our component is great there will be things it may not work with, so check first.

I hope this long reply gets your questions sorted and the tips help you. If you have any further questions feel free to ask, i'm here to help when i can

Have a great day

Paul,

The reply was long and very informative. In fact I did not pay close enough attention to notice the differences among Socialize and the demo site. (might be misleading not using JomSocial’s own template)
It triggers some other questions:
- Socialize template compared to Nano3, besides the top static bar what other advantages does your template offer?
- Regarding ‘cheap’ hosting…I will start with site ground’s entry level (reasonably priced I think…$3.95/month, is that cheap?) hosting until I have proven viability of my site.
- If I want to tweak the socialize template: would some of your developers(and partners) be able to help?
- How much traffic does the largest site that uses JomSocial get on a daily basis?

Frequent backups = I hear you loud and clear
Extension compatibility = upfront communication (doing it now with you!)

Thanks Paul!

Regards,

Harry

Hi Harry,

In regards to socialize and the Nano3 template the main difference is that nano3 doesn't do any style changes to Jomsocial. It styles the site, not our product. The socialize template styles the site and Jomsocial so all the buttons and theme of the site is consistent with Jomsocial. other than how the site looks it is the same as if you purchased any other template that styles Jomsocial for example the Gavick or bow themes templates.

$3.95 for hosting is cheap if you are going to setup a business site or if you need specific features. The example is if you want to do video processing in jomsocial you need FFMPEG installed on the server, low cost hosting normally have version 0.8 and this is way to old to work with Jomsocial. It must be above at least V1.2, Because it is a shared host i have never heard of them upgrading it so you might find that you cannot do video processing from that hosting account. But this all depends on what you want to use your site for. There are other video options you can use as work arounds but they cost extra.

Our support guys can guide you with where things are in the code and point you in the right direction but our policy is we don't do or support customisations.

Sites vary in size, we have a few with a user base of over 200,000 users, a few others with approx 1 million hits a month. if you get to those figures please let me know. :)

Have a good day

Thanks Paul you were very helpful.

500,000 users is my target. Shoot for the stars and land on the moon!

Thanks again,

Harry