Intergration between Community Builder RC2 and aMember?

Hello All,

I'm curious regarding the status of some sort of intergration between aMember and Community Builder RC2?

I came across this thread on the aMember forum: http://www.amember.com/forum/showthread.php?t=3696&page=2&highlight=builder

However, it did not look very promising due to the tone of the messages.

From what I understand there is a Joomla plugin available for aMember. And that this works with the standard login module.

I am will to invest some time and money to get CB RC2 integrated with aMember . Is there anyone else out there how has a similar interest?

I hope that the prior situation/misunderstanding that happened back this past fall in the aMemeber forum has not completely killed everyone's motivation to continue to work towards an intergration solution between CB RC2 and aMember.

I have yet to come across a script that has such great support from the developer (Alex) and a good track record.

Unfortunatly, I have not had the same experience with some of the mambo/joomla payment solutions. The current solutions tend to rely primarly on PayPal. Further, the level of continuous development and pre and post customer support of some the current the mambo/joomla payment solutions are seriously lacking when compared to aMember. (This is not to be taken a CRITICISM, but constructive criticism - and based on my OWN expereince)

If Joomla! is truly to be used for commercial applications, there must be payment modules that are solidly developed and SUPPORTED. I have found that the easiest way to destroy customer confidence is to begin to screw up their product/subscription payments.


Three main questions:

1. Could someone highlight what are the main issues with the integration between aMember and CB RC2?

2. Does anyone have some ideas as to what is involved in integrating these two components/modules/plugins?

3. Does anyone know roughly where development was at before the the turn of the year?

All the best,

Jason Wright
Helsinki, Finland

this discussion FORTUNATELY seems to never end!

I am new to the whole Joomla-Subscription-PaymentSolution Topic, but definitely NEED a solid, good supported and reliable solution.

Joomla and CB became my way of choice.
As J! 1.1 and CB STABLE seem to be released alsomst simultaneously and the both dev teams seem to work together very close, i am pretty sure the combination will be as solid as needed.

As ALL users of that combination seem to be constantly seeking for the best, most reliable and supported payment solution (no one seems to be really satisfied with his/her current solution or din't decide yet), I think an integration of amember would be a dream come true and safe many webmasters many long nights of troubleshooting.

This beeing said, i want to point out I am also willing to spend $$ for a solid integration. I saw comments about $ in several other threads and forums, so i even would be willing to bring all those together who can afford to speed up an integration.

Although i would want to wait that short time for the release of J! 1.1 and CB 1.0 STABLE. That makes sense to me because as J! users and developers know, there will be some significant changes to the J! core, especially when it comes to 3rd party integration.

One thing was not clear for me though. In another thread Alex said:
"Unfortunately, full integration between aMember and Mambo still be impossible even with CB.
So we decided to don't implement this until aMember3, where we will try to make it working as it should."

So is it complex, VERY complex or IMPOSSIBLE to integrate at the moment?

I am very sorry to hear that and just thought the integration might become possible with the new J! framework?!

@Alex: If you say amember 3 will take an unknown time to be released, i would like to have your short statement on this...?!?

Cheers,
Norman

thanks alex for all your efforts.
to give you a little support i found out the following:

to have J!&CB support multiple user groups, i need to use JACL (http://www.byostech.com/). Anyway, many user that would love an integration os amember into J!&CB probably don't even need that. I would though.

As for the functionality of an integration the following things came into my mind and would probably fit the needs of most people that request this integation:

. Using only amember login module in J!
> That would require you to have the databases synchronized IMMEDIATELY after registration. Or use just one...

. Giving access to different member groups by payment (in my case working together with JACL as well, other might have just public & registered)

.having the option to build in "buy now" buttons for other products.

. My biggest dream would be to have the affiliate functionality accessible in cb/j! as a module/tab in CB profile. Here's the reason:
I want ANY member (all at least registered ones) to be an affiliate. They should have their promo-material and source codes for that "ready made" with their aff-IDs already in the code to copy&paste!
You can PM me for further detailes on this.

just some suggestions...

So did this turn out to be possible?

Thanks Alex, I sent you an email. For all the help you have given me, and the great addition this would make, I would be happy to assist.

hi alex and asa...

this is freeman again from the post above.
i am happy to see you progress with the dev for the cb plugin!

if i can be of any help, let me know!!!

can you already say what the plugin would be able to do???

yours,
freeman

I agree with Alex, the current limitations of the CB environment make it kind of pointless. Another important point, which is ultimately the killer for me, is that there are only a few pre-defined group levels in Joomla. Even if CB worked, this makes integration pretty limited.

For now I think I am going to move to something like Xoops.

the group-limitations in j!

hi asa,

i had the same problem of to limited user group functionality.
i implemented JACL by biostech.com.
it's a core hack, but tested and working with cb.

you should have a look. the support is great and they had a new version of their hack/component out 24h after the new J! 1.0.8.

freeman

Hey Alex, I would love to be a beta tester for this.. I have several paid versions of amember..

Tim

Not sure I understand the limitations with the proposed integration w/ cb. Would I be able to control access to other 3rd party integrations such as a gallery, forum and multiuser blog? I want to use cb to create a user profile with links to the various features of a portal community.

Thanks,

Zoren

I'm just curious if someone can help me out. I went out "on my own" to find out what the best solution would be for what I was looking for. Guess what conclusion I came to? It would be Joomla and Community Builder!

I only want the community builder available to "upgraded" members from my amember powered site. Right now, I have ammeber integrated with my help desk, my forum, List Mail Pro, and 3 different "member only" areas.

What I want to do is.... allow them to sign up on my site (amember powered). then, I want them to be able to accesss the powerful community features of Joomla. I understand that this is not doable now.. That I have to make them sign up in Joomla first. But that's not going to happen for me --- it's not even an option (unless I totally missed something).

so, is there ANYTHING I can do? Like import users into Joomla, or have them create a Joomla user-id and account, wait for authorization after a cross check to Amember that they have paid, then approve it, or use some sort of 3rd party application plugin to import users one way? Or ANYTHING? What about doing some sort of SQL query by "unique email address?" and (if that email address exists in the amember database, they're allowed to access Joomla? or something?)

I guess I'm a little crushed and not willing to take "no" for an answer quite yet.

But if it's not Joomla and community builder, did you guys find anything that's kind of similar to Joomla and Community Builder that WOULD work?

I was looking at Xoops.. Is this a good alternative? Maybe I should try that ?

Is the Amember functionality better there (from amember over to Xoops)?

ok.

I tried Xoops. It's really kind of clunky compared to Joomla. It also doesn't have the community or the add-on modules that Joomla has.

So what if I DON'T use Community Builder, just straight Joomla with a
bunch of modules? That will work correct? I mean, I can add a bunch of modules that "almost" get it to where I want and then cross my fingers for later integration. I just won't be able to have them connect to each other or have the nice tabs on each profile, but I can add a lot of modules.

Is there a plan (in amember pro 3) to have some sort of CB
integration or is it completely out of the question?

I realize I am very late getting into this conversation .... but it's new to me since I'm new to integrating aMember into Joomla.

I am wondering why would one want to integrate aMember into Community Builder in the first place? I mean, aMember handles the database for member registration into not only Joomla, but many message boards as well (i.e. phpBB). Seems to me that aMember is somewhat of an all-in-one solution ... fo rthose who want to offer paid membership functionality to their Joomla sites.

Just my two cents worth . . . but since this discussion is over a year old, I'm curious as to whether anything further became of it.

www.MySmallBizU.com is running Amember/CB

Community Builder memberships are possible with amember, here's how.

http://www.MySmallBizU.com uses amember and the following amember plugins:

1. Perldesk
2. PHPList
3. Community Builder

Plus I'm using the amember affiliate tracking and autoreponder - everyone that registers at the site thru Community builder, is automatically an affiliate in Amember. After that I use the amember autoresponder to send followups...

If you want to see how it all works just join the community.

The only reason that this setup works as a membership site with amember is that www.mysmallbizu.com uses amember to protect the licenses for 1000 training videos in the site... not login access to the site (that's controled by Community Builder which updates the amembers db).

This is the only way I've found that allows you to use Community Builder with Joomla and still use amember for membership billing - have it protect something other than access to the site.

Joomla 1.5 changes the way joomla manages access control lists and I think this will allow for an easier way to integrate these great scripts!

If you have questions about my setup, pm me...