JFBConnect v5.2 is now available and brings Twitter authentication, EasySocial and Joomla "user profile" support, a new Open Graph debugger tool, a new social sharing module, and a new registration flow option for tighter integration with your existing Joomla, EasySocial and JomSocial registration paths. It's a big, big release, just 3 months after our last release which included Google+ authentication. Read on for all the details, or go get it now and for some awesome Joomla social networking integration!
As always, for the finer details, please see the full JFBConnect Changelog (with over 50 individual changes)
JFBConnect is growing with the addition of more social network integration. WIth the v5.1 release in August, we added Google+ integration for Joomla. This new release brings Twitter authentication and profile import to your favorite Joomla extensions: JomSocial, EasySocial, Community Builder, Kunena, K2, Virtuemart and more.
The process for setting up your Twitter application and configuring the profile import is streamlined and meant to take just a few minutes.
We already support some of the most popular profile extensions out there, but are happy to add integration for more in this release.
This hot new extension from StackIdeas was released in early October, and we've already had many users clamoring for integration. With v5.2, profile integration along with the new registration flow option (see below) is now available. For profile import, you can choose the user's profile type, whether to skip the activation that may be required for that profile type, and pre-fill or hide fields that have data being imported into them. All of this helps you to customize your registration flow how you want, while making it easier for your users to sign up.
This is just the beginning of our EasySocial integration. There will be new tools and features added with each release going forward.
Joomla 2.5 and later ship with a "User - Profile" plugin. While limited, it offers an easy, built-in profile system that can be used to import information about your users. JFBConnect now supports the importing of social network profile information into these profiles, as well as pre-filling the data for form-based registraitons
Using another system to store profile information? Whether it's an extension we don't currently support, or it's your own custom database tables, our new Custom Database plugin was meant to help import profile information into it. Just add the database and table information, and JFBConnect will let you insert and update rows with our easy to use interface.
JFBConnect has long offered 2 registration options: Automatic, where the user's account is created automatically and no forms are required to be filled out; and "Normal", where there are fields for a user to enter their profile information. The "Normal" registration had a lot of flexibility to allow you to hide the username, email, password and show/hide fields from other extensions, such as JomSocial.
The problem with "Normal" registration is that it's an entirely new registration flow for you (the administrator) to manage, style, and test.
With JFBConnect v5.2, we're adding a new option for alternative registration flows. With these options, you can choose Joomla, JomSocial or EasySocial as your registration component. When a user logs in for the first time with a social network, they'll be redirected to the 3rd party registration form, fill it out, and JFBConnect will link the new account with their social network credentials automatically.
Better yet, since you're importing information from the social network, some fields, like username, email, and profile information that's being imported can be hidden if you want. That's the best of both worlds: your existing registration flow with less information required from the user!
Open Graph has been an exciting and wildly popular feature for JFBConnect. However, setting up the tags, verifying they work, and detecting and fixing conflicts have been a challenge at some points. There are lots of things that JFBConnect tries to do automatically, but sometimes there can be conflicts with other extensions. Now, when you're logged in as a super admin and have the "Enable Debugging" setting enabled, you'll see a popup in the bottom left. Expand it, and you'll see all the Open Graph details about your page from JFBConnect.
We're excited to have your feedback about this feature for how it works, how it can be improved, and how else we can help streamline and simplify our configuration process.
We've been at a breakneck pace the last few months with development, and we have no plans of slowing down. Here's what's (tentativly) on the radar for the next few major releases:
