One of the most interesting interactive technologies (and perhaps the fastest growing) is the wiki system. Under a wiki system, users post contributions, and then subsequent visitors can edit or augment this content. The most famous example is Wikipedia, which is a user-generated encyclopedia. Any user can post a new entry, and then the system will track changes made by the users.

Although Joomla operates as a CMS and can readily accept new content from contributors, it was not designed to allow a large number of people to make minor changes or modifications to content — exactly the functionality provided by a wiki. There are several good offerings of Joomla extensions that add wiki capabilities to Joomla, including OpenWiki and WikiBot.

OpenWiki
OpenWiki provides a bridge to encapsulate the PHP application DokuWiki within the Joomla system. It features a complete ACL implementation that builds on the Joomla ACL for groups such as Super  Administrator, Administrator, Manager, Author, Registered, and Public. ACL permissions include create, edit, read, upload, and delete.

An event calendar is a perfect way to offer a centralized place for people interested in a topic area to find out about events related to it. It also bridges an online community to physical meetings and interaction.

The event calendar extensions available to Joomla users are simple yet well-implemented. The Events Calendar (JEvents) extension allows great flexibility in display and categorization. JCalPro  provides more control over repeating events and scheduling.

If you don’t want to host the event calendar on your Web site, the Google Calendar (www.google.com/calendar) is a free service that will host an event calendar for you. You can use the Joomla Wrapper module to include it in your Web site. The Google Calendar even includes automatic event reminders that can notify (either through email or mobile phone messages) people who subscribed to the calendar.

Though the most popular example is MySpace.com, social networking pages can be anything from a “my favorite movies” list to a display section for family recipes. It is a way of classifying and sharing list of bookmarks and through these lists the contents that they point toward. With a social network, the host site allows sharing content lists with other users through links or email.

In a social network, users create lists of Internet bookmarks that they find interesting or useful. Bookmarks are generally categorized or associated with given tags so that they can be searched and sorted. Other people can access their lists and often rank the usefulness of the link or the list itself. Often, these lists of bookmarks are published as an RSS feed so that interested parties can view the latest bookmarks for a given list.

Joomla’s article structure makes it a perfect host for content that can be linked to by others. Several exten- sions provide interfaces to the various social networking sites so that a user needs only to click on an icon to add an article on your site to a bookmark list. One of the most popular social networking extensions for Joomla is SocialBookmarkerBot.

Comments are a particularly effective method of community building. They don’t require the blank-slate topic generation of a message board, and yet they allow people to post their comments and share their views about a specific content item on the site. The number of successful sites that feature comment capabilities is almost uncountable. Some sites (such as epinions.com) don’t even produce much original content — the majority of the site is dedicated to user opinions. This is actually becoming a common feature on all large sites. Some sites that have the comment feature include Ain’t It Cool News, Target, Macy’s, The Superficial, and TMZ. By implementing AkoComment or !JoomlaComment extensions on your Joomla site, you can allow visitors to provide their comments to any article. Enabling commenting capability on your site does more than provide an open forum for constructive criticism. It allows visitors to supplement the content of an article with additional information and hyperlinks.

AkoComment Tweaked Special Edition 1.4.6
One of the most popular comment engines is the AkoComment extension. All of its display is provided through CSS layout, which gives the Web master complete control over the comment appearance. The AkoComment extension provides the following features:

❑       Rich text commenting system

Forums are extremely popular methods of product support for both commercial and Open Source applications. In fact, the Joomla community thrives because of the forums (forum.joomla.org) that cater to both Joomla Web masters and Joomla developers. This forum uses the Simple Machines Forum (SMF) application to provide message-posting services.

Message boards predate the Web in the form of an electronic Bulletin Board System (BBS), the most popular among them probably being The Well. When the Internet began to grow, the Usenet “distributed Internet discussion system” gained prominence. Now, Web-based forums can be easily incorporated into an existing Web site or Joomla system.

Simple Machines Forum (SMF)
The Simple Machines Forum (SMF) is the forum component that is used for a message board on the central Joomla site (www.joomla.org), so it has proven its ability to sustain great amounts of traffic and continue to perform well. The application is available in more than 20 languages, including English, Albanian, Arabic, Swedish, Catalan, Persian, Chinese, Finnish, Greek, Japanese, Turkish, Portuguese, French, Dutch, Spanish, German, Hungarian, Hebrew, Bulgarian, Italian, Thai, Polish, Russian, Norwegian, and Romanian.