Using Joomla!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 12. Engaging and Keeping in Touch with Your Users

Everywhere you go on the Internet, you see ways to connect to social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and many others. These networks give users a common home to connect and share their ideas, photos, videos, and more. If your website is also a place where users with a shared interest come together to interact, you’ll want to add some of these social sharing features. This makes your site more engaging and improves the “stickiness” factor—reasons for your users to keep coming back.

Getting Social with JomSocial

There are a few nice social extensions available for Joomla, but JomSocial has done it better than the others. Originally developed by Azrul, it’s now run by the folks at iJoomla.

Hands-On Exercise: Installing and Configuring JomSocial

Let’s set up a social website for pet owners by first installing JomSocial. Go to Extension Manager→Install and choose the installation package. After JomSocial is installed, go to Components→JomSocial and click on Configuration to see the subsections as seen in Figure 12-1.

Adjust anything you think you might need, but here are a few things we’ll customize for our site. First, we’ll set up user profiles and custom profile fields, and configure a few basic settings.

Figure 12-1. First adjust the JomSocial configuration

1. Under Site, we will enable the ability to use multiple profiles, ...