Kunena 2.0 Released
- Details
- Published on Thursday, 07 June 2012 01:00
Important Update: Kunena 2.0.1
The Kunena team has released Kunena 2.0.1 for Joomla 1.5 and Joomla 2.5. This is an important maintenance release and replacement for Kunena 2.0 and we recommend that all users upgrade to this version at the earliest opportunity. Please read the K 2.0.1 release notes for important details about this release.
Introduction
The Kunena team is very pleased to announce Kunena 2.0.0 in stable version as a native Joomla extension for J! 1.5 and J! 2.5. In this version the Kunena team has fixed many issues (and has added some new functionality) to make Kunena more popular and more robust than before.
Kunena 2.0 is a project that has been over two years in the making. Among other things, one of the main design objectives for Kunena 2.0 is remove the last remaining Fireboard legacy issues from the code. With the end of J! 1.5 in sight and with J! 2.5 growing in popularity, this new version of Kunena will better satisfy the demands of users around the world who want reliability and scalability to meet their growing needs.
What's different?
People may not notice, at first sight, the substantial differences between the version of Kunena that they have been using and this newest version. For example, the Blue Eagle template still exists and looks similar, the categories are organised similarly, too, but you can be assured that there's a lot that's happened behind the scenes. For starters, there is overall improved performance and many of the problems that existed in previous versions have now been fixed. While people may not see many differences in the front end, the backend/forum administration has a modern new look and feel. Therefore, even though people may not see changes, they should be aware that a considerable number of structural changes have been made.
After months of testing, feedback from the those who have beening using Kunena 2.0 is that it feels more intuitive and, after getting used to a few small changes, much easier to use both for administrators and end-users alike.
Because of the substantial changes that this new version introduces it is important that you read through the Kunena 2.0.0 release notes carefully before installing for the first time or if you are upgrading from an earlier version of Kunena.
The complete list of changes is too large to be included here, but an overview of them is given in Kunena Features (which also offers a handy comparison chart to see how the new version compares with previous versions). Key elements of this new version are:
- Total rewrite of the K 1.7 codebase.
- Database schema optimisation for improved performance and scalability to large forums up to millions of posts.
- A new framework that other Joomla extensions can use.
- Joomla! MVC compliance, making it easy for designers to customise Kunena.
- Meeting the emerging and current web technology trends and giving users better experience.
Upgrading to K 2.0 involves changes that may affect Kunena's interoperability with other extensions installed on your site. For your own benefit, please ensure that all extensions that currently integrate with Kunena are up-to-date and compatible with K 2.0. Some examples of affected extensions are SEF components, social networking, private messaging and Tapatalk. If you have questions about compatibility with these things, please contact the developer(s) of the extension(s) that you are currently using.
Highlights
General
- Improved BBCode support and functionality (e.g. spoiler tag)
- Improved integration with J! 2.5 ACL
- A completely new approach to managing custom menu items (e.g. rules, help pages)
- New forum views (e.g. threaded topic layout)
- Improved topic creation (e.g. forcing a user to select a category before posting in the first-listed category)
- Improved subscription/email functionality
- Categories now have unique SEF aliases - no mode category ids in the new urls:
- New: Global moderators can now manage announcements (before: list of user ids)
- New: Global moderators can remove thank you
- New: Locked categories with no posts are threaded as sections
- New: Shadow topics are now always created when merging topics (keeps old URL working)
- New: Router uses Joomla! 2.5 transliteration settings
- New: Topic icons for deleted, unapproved, locked, sticky
- New: Topic starter and moderators can change topic icon on reply
- Removed: kunena_menu module position
- Removed: PDF output (Joomla! 2.5 doesn't include the library out of the box)
- Better organized and smaller language files
- Router has been redesigned for better performance and to be more general
- Router can convert most legacy urls into new ones
Settings:
- Moved: Integrations are now plug-ins
- Changed: Empty board email address now means: use site address
- New: Added new Image / file upload options (moderators & admins only)
- New: Ability to hide page creation time
- New: Manage attachments in user profiles
- New: Guests / new users need approval on posting
- New: Attachment limit per post
- New: No category selected on posting
- New: Fallback to English if translations are missing
- New: Caching
- Removed or changed a few settings (most should be the same after migration)
Bug fixes:
- Category index only shows topics which user can see
- New indication was cleared when someone posted a message to the topic
Most of the previously-released add-on extensions for Kunena have been updated to work with this new version; add-ons designed for earlier versions of Kunena will not work with this version; these add-ons need to be installed separately and include, among others, Kunena Discuss plugin and Kunena Latest module. Kunena add-on software is available from the main site download area.
Other details
Find the full online README: Here
K 2.0.0 is available for download on the download page.
Thanks also to the team for moving the code over to MVC, must have been a lot of hard work but Kunena is so much nicer to work with now.
I still have the original fireboard files lying around and looking back through those, the forum sure has come a long way.
K 2.1 will still run on J! 1.5 and J! 2.5. K 3.0 will run on J! 2.5 and we hope to get it also working on J! 3.0. K 3.0 will not operate on J! 1.5.
My Kunena installation have more than 18k users, 603754 messages and 12306 topics. I hope that 2.0 version make it faster.
