Kunena - To Speak! Next Generation Native Joomla Forum

Welcome to Kunena, a Communication Platform for Joomla.

Kunena is the ideal forum extension for Joomla. It's free, fully integrated, and no bridges or hacks are required.

The Kunena Project is an open source project for and by the Joomla community. If you need a top-quality discussion forum and like what our community is doing, we invite you to support Kunena by joining the community forum, creating documentation, or helping develop great new features. Feel free to see how Kunena works on our showcase, test drive Kunena on our demo playground, or just jump to downloading Kunena. You can even fork it on GitHub.

Revving up for Kunena 2.0

Monday, 16 April 2012 20:21

Kunena 2.0 is a project that has been over two years in the making. The design objectives for Kunena 2.0 are, primarily, to implement changes that "remove the last of the remaining Fireboard legacy". In the course of this project, a number of improvements were backported to K 1.5 resulting in the transitional software known as K 1.6 (now K 1.7). With the end of J! 1.5 in sight and with J! 2.5 growing in popularity, that transitional version is less likely to fulfil the demands of users around the world who want reliability and scalability to meet their growing needs.

There's nothing seriously wrong with K 1.7. K 1.7, like it's predecessors, was based on the legacy of Fireboard and, in that sense, it is limited in meeting the emerging and current web technology trends that we witness today — issues like CSS3, mobile web apps, among others. Further, the design of Kunena in the versions available up to K 1.7 is not optimised for large websites involving millions of messages or hundreds of thousands of users. Change is inevitable under these conditions in order to make Kunena the most reliable, scalable, durable and robust forum component for Joomla that we can make it and to give people the best solution to meeting their forum needs.

The main design objectives for Kunena 2.0 are, among others:

Database schema optimisation for improved performance and scalability to large forums up to millions of posts.
Creating a Kunena framework that can be easily used in other Joomla extensions.
Joomla! MVC compliance, making it easy for designers to customise Kunena.
Meeting the emerging and current web technology trends and giving users better experience.

As work continues to be done to develop a public release of Kunena 2.0, we will shortly be making visible changes to this website. The first of these changes will be to implement Kunena 2.0 here, at www.kunena.org, so that everyone will have the opportunity to trial the new software before a public beta release becomes available. This article describes some of those changes that people will see.