To encourage users in my web-community The Round Table of Bretonnia to participate in various activity, I wrote a little Component for the CMS Joomla, along with a Plugin for the Community Builder component to handle awards or achievements.
With jAwards you can create custom medals for your community and hand them out to deserving members, e.g. for participating in contests, or submitting articles. The frontend shows an overview about the available awards, and who earned which one. Internationalization for Frontend and Backend is available in English, German and French at the moment. More user-contributed translations are welcome!
The new hosting place for the code is at GitHub: https://github.com/ahornung/jawards
The jAwards component can be downloaded from the GitHub releases (tags). The code repository also contains a medals starter pack (medals.zip).
Install the downloaded zip file for the component in the Joomla-Backend as usual. An update to a newer version is possible by deinstalling the component and installing the newer version (Backup your files and database just in case!). More information is available in the Readme.
One word about terminology before getting started: Medals are what you have to create first (consisting of an image and description). When you hand it out to a user, it's an Award (consisting of Medal, User and a date).
With the jAwards-plugin for Community Builder, the medals each user has earned can be displayed in a tab within the user's profile. Download the package from the GitHub releases, install and configure it like any other Community Builder plugin.
Inspired by the medals-mod for phpBB, I am also showing random medals of the users below their avatar in forum posts in Fireboard. This requires manually changing the code, as described in this document.
Any kind of feedback in the form of suggestions, feature requests or bug reports is appreciated. Just contact me personally or submit an issue at GitHub.
jAwards is released as Open Source under the license GNU GPL. If you like the component, I really appreciate any small donation: