JFBConnect v6.1, the Joomla social networking extension, is available now with a new social stream feature to show posts from a Facebook Group or Page, Twitter Stream, or LinkedIn Company in a fully customizable stream on your Joomla site. Oh yeah, Instagram, GitHub and VK authentication and profile import as well as dozens of other features and improvements are included.
With the social channels feature, introduced in JFBConnect v6.0, we added the ability to push content to various different social networks. Now, you can easily import the feeds from those social networks into a fully customizable "Social Stream".
With the social stream, you can merge feeds from various different networks and fully change how a post from each network is displayed. With a fully configurable template file for each network and channel, you can control the look of a post from a Facebook Page vs a Facebook Group vs a Twitter Stream. Additionally, with full control of the CSS, you can create fully responsive streams that integrate into the looks of your site.
Just look at the bottom of this site for a live example of our social stream. It's fully responsive, so go ahead and resize the browser and see how beautifully it updates!
The social stream feature currently works with Facebook Groups, Facebook Pages, Twitter Streams and LinkedIn Company Pages.
Pushing forward with adding new social network abilities to JFBConnect, this release adds integration from 3 distinct providers. Each has their benefits, depending on your site. Of course, you can always choose which social networks you want to enable on your site.
Adding Instagram, GitHub or VK to your Joomla site will allow a quick way for users to import their avatar and profile information from those networks into EasySocial, JomSocial, Community Builder, Kunena or any of the other Joomla profile extensions JFBConnect supports.
Instagram is a wildly popular image sharing application, primarily for mobile devices. While owned by Facebook, it's a separate entity and provides an excellent opportunity to draw in a more artistic audience.
Primarily a 'developer' website for hosting source code for projects, GitHub may not be a logical choice for all websites. If your site is in any way technically oriented, enabling GitHub integration for your Joomla site is an excellent way to get more users into your site without any registration forms.
The largest social network in Russia and in the top 10 worldwide, VK is a Facebook-like social network that you may not have even heard of (depending on your locale). However, you'd be wise to investigate if your site has an international audience. If so, opening up VK authentication can provide a quick boost to your community.
Until now, JFBConnect has had a pretty rigid login button scheme. Sure, there is a great login theme system. In general though, there were options for a 'big' and 'little' button to show for the social networks. As we added more social networks, we realized that more control was required.
Now, within the SCLogin module or the {JFBCLogin} Easy-Tags, you can set the order of the social network login buttons as well as the image to use for each social network. That's extremely powerful if you want to enable all 7 social networks, but realize that most users will only be logging in with Facebook and Twitter, for example. In that case, simply make the Facebook and Twitter buttons use big images and the others can use smaller images. The options will still be there, but won't be overwhelming to your users.
Additionally, you can now set easily create and add your own login buttons. Just drop a new image in the /media/sourcecoast/images/provider/facebook/ folder (or any other social network) and you'll see that as an option in the JFBConnect and SCLogin configuration area. Create your own custom buttons for all networks!
The new Social Debugtool has been integrated into the social toolbar, allowing for quickly visualizing what a status update/feed post about your site would look like in Facebook, Google, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Social Debug is a completely free tool for testing the social meta tags in your content and getting recommendations before actually posting to all the different social networks.
JFBConnect v6.1 is, frankly, huge. The above are the 'major' points, but check out the full JFBConnect Changelog to get a picture of all the individual features, changes and bug-fixes. Some runner ups for major features are:
Did you know that JFBConnect has 250 reviews on the Joomla Extension Directory as well as perfect 5-star score? There's a reason so many sites use JFBConnect and all of our users love what it adds to their site. If you've never used JFBConnect, or need to get a new subscription to add all the great features above, there's a giant, easy-to-use button below. Go ahead and make your Joomla site a social network powerhouse!
