Throughout this book, we have worked on JomSocial, a Joomla! extension that works right out of the box with minimal customization. However, there are various other social networking and community-building Joomla! extensions. In this chapter, we discuss such extensions, which are still being actively developed and updated: Community Builder, JSocial Suite, Linksutra, CBE, Tuiyo, and Odude. These community building and social networking extensions are to be considered as alternatives to the JomSocial Joomla! social networking component. We will discuss Community Builder and JSocial Suite in some detail.
We can also install these extensions on our local host for testing, and then use the Akeebabackup Joomla! backup extension to back up the installation and migrate it to a remote host.