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.

Online chat can mean anything from a traditional direct chat room interface to the newer Shoutbox implementations that add instant messaging (IM) capabilities to a site. In recent years, chat features have gained a somewhat dubious reputation because of their use by predators who seek to lure underage participants. Not a week goes by without some news feature or investigative piece airing on television that describes some villain using a chat room for bad purposes.

While a huge majority of chat rooms are certainly not dens of iniquity, the problem is significant enough that you should give it serious consideration before adding these capabilities to your site. The immediate interactive nature of an online chat makes it much more likely to be abused than other technologies where interaction is non-instantaneous and, the interaction is generally posted for the entire world to see.

You should also know about the legal implications if a bad person were to use your site for some form of crime.