Community Builder, commonly abbreviated as CB by its users, is a piece of software that empowers the user profiles of a web site that is built with Joomla.
It consists of a component and a few modules that allow user authentication and assist with the administration of users.
One of the features of Community Builder is that it allows the administrator to easily create custom registration fields.
For example, if you are operating a music web site, you may want to ask your users to fill in their music preferences, favorite singers or bands, and whether they are professional musicians or not.
But the power of Community Builder really presents itself in social networking.
You want visitors to keep coming back to your web site.
What better way is there than to create a social network within the site? You may find that it is insufficient to merely install Community Builder by itself.
The strength of CB is that it allows the usage of plugins that have been specially written to run in the user profile page.
There are many quality plugins available for CB that really increases its functionality.
For example, plugins exist that allow users to leave each other messages on their profiles, display photo galleries on user profiles and even watch videos.
There's also a viral plugin that lets your users choose to invite their friends to join them by searching their email address books.
There are really huge social networks on the web; we've seen them and may even have participated in them.
With Joomla and Community Builder, we can empower our sites in that direction too.
Our resulting web sites may not be the next Facebook, but it may be enough to create a thriving community that keeps coming back.