Its an exciting week here in the Kunena community and especially for me, Oliver (aka fxstein). Two years ago, we published Kunena for the very first time. We recognize two important dates: January 27, 2009, when we uploaded Kunena 1.0.7 to this website, and February 2, 2009, when Kunena was first published on the Joomla Extension Directory. In the days that followed, the site went from no traffic to bustling with excitement. Matias and I were caught by surprise since we did not think Kunena would catch on so quickly. We had no idea that what was about to come would overshadow anything that had come before.
In 2007, I discovered Fireboard (the predecessor of Kunena) and used it for a while on my personal website, which included doing my fair share of private bug fixes. When it became clear that keeping my own fixes was not so easy when each new release came out, I had no choice but to join their development team in 2008 and started cranking away on bugs — literally hundreds of them. For a couple of months, I fixed and improved a lot of things. The prior development team was no longer engaged in the project and help from other community members was initially rather slow. So for six months, I did bug fixes and nobody released anything. Eventually, it became pretty clear to me that the Fireboard project was beyond salvageable and the prior leadership team ultimately turned off the forums on their site. It was a turning point and a few weeks later, we decided to open Kunena.com and release a long awaited bug fix release labeled Kunena 1.0.7.
A few months prior to the shutdown of FireBoard, I had the pleasure of meeting Louis Landry with a bunch of guys running around with red blinking little devil horns at a local event in Palo Alto, CA. From those little devil horns you might have guessed that the Free BSD project was having a party downtown. I had a couple drinks with Louis and explained to him how forums—or better yet, an integrated communication engine—would have been so nice to see in the Joomla sphere. In his unique, cool way he just asked me why I would not fork it. Fork it?
I have been doing software development since the early 80s, starting in school and later in college, but I had never forked somebody else's project. I'd been around open source for a few years, but I was still learning my way around it. Fork it? How would you go about it and why would you do it? After a few more drinks an idea started growing in me. How about a communications engine for Joomla that is run as a little community unto itself. No company behind it, no strings attached. A way to give back to the community for what I have been given for free so many times.
It was a little frightening to say the least. It's one thing to join an existing project, a very different to start one from scratch. But then again, something I have enjoyed all my live: trying out bold new things, or jumping in when projects where in helpless states.
That evening I went home, turned on my computer and started looking for a name: Swahili, Greek and other exotic languages. No matter where you look these days there are not many words out there in any language that are not already registered as domain names or trademarked. Swahili - hmm - just like Joomla - what could possible make sense for a forum that should ultimately become so much more. There it was: Kunena - To Speak. It jumped right at me. It does not get any better, surely that word was 'taken' just like som many others before. A google search reveals 2 results - to my biggest surprise! First line was Google famous: Did you mean? - no I did not mean kunene. 2nd result was a blog post from a british traveler who made it through Swahili speaking territory in Africa. The only real result on google. Sweet! I might have found what I was looking for! No domain name registered, no trademark to be found.
Went to my domain registration website and bought the domain and a few related. There it was: Kunena - To Speak
While the word was a little funny at first (yeah - got that reaction in the early days from some of our first visitors) it started growing on all of us and so did the software, the community and all the people who joined in the actively help.
The first month with meaningful downloads was February 2009. Now 2 years later we could not be more excited. Traffic and adoption have been growing strong. At first a few thousand downloads in a month, then 20,000, then 40,000, .... all the way to January of 2011 - the first month that saw more than 80,000 downloads! Two months ago Kunena joined the top 10 all-time most downloaded projects for Joomla. Today Kunena finally surpassed the 1,000,000 (million) downloads mark with hundreds of thousands of websites running Kunena as of today.
Some three months ago we made another bold move: we changed the domain from kunena.com to now kunena.org to reflect the community nature of the site and the project. There is no company involved here at Kunena, this is not the marketing gig of yet another consulting or advertising company that wants to get their name out, or a vehicle that would be turned into making money by going commercial. Kunena is a community not a product, not a company. We all donate our time into this great project and have and are learning so much from each other.
We started out with Kunena 1.0, a few months later we launched the long awaited Joomla 1.5 native version Kunena 1.5 and just 6 months ago we launched Kunena 1.6 - our biggest milestone to date. With Kunena 1.6 we have targeted native compatibility with Joomla 1.6 - even though Joomla itself was evolving slower than Kunena 1.6. Now that Joomla 1.6 is out we are still working a few issues that allow us to boldly say: Kunena 1.6 is Joomla 1.6 native. The next release of Kunena 1.6 is already well under way and will hit the site in the upcoming days.
In parallel our development team has been working hard on yet the next version of Kunena: 2.0. We are just about to be able to share the very first Alpha version of Kunena 2.0. It is not complete and many new features are still in the works. However the core and pretty much all Kunena 1.6 functionality is now working on a new foundation, a brand new bbcode parser, a massively overhauled and optimized data model and new code optimizations and caching concepts. The main goal so far was to make Kunena scale to the largest of forum sites out there, or run smaller sites on even smaller servers than before. Kunena 2.0 will be the major release of the project for 2011. By getting an Alpha out early, we hope to be well on track to deliver a stable 2.0 platform well within 2011.
We realize that there are many feature requests and wishes. We keep looking at the list and are implementing the ones that most of you benefit from, we also pick the ones that we ourselves need most on our own sites. We encourage all of you to contribute to the fabulous project. Help us design, code, moderate, support, document and so much more. We need your help. We are all volunteers and we need more of them. The community has come together to support each other in various ways.
Some six months ago we also opened up the Kunena Extension Directory - a way for the community to share templates, modules, plugins, even hacks but also languages and image sets. With more than 75 listings this has quickly become a highly utilized repository for the Kunena community to identify and find useful extensions to their Kunena platform.
After the initial success we also realized that we had to protect our work and name and set out to trademark and a name for this project.
2 years - what a ride. There is no day where our skype group chats and internal forums aren't busy with ideas and most importantly progress. If you have seen the stats we published for Joomla Day West 2010, 3 of us: Matias, xillibit and myself have become part of the top 15 contributors of all of Joomla. I think Matias is #3 and xillibit #7 overall.
I am personally very impressed by the team, its dedication, professionalism and the fact that after 2 years we are doing more and more all the time. Kunena had 8 straight quarters of continuous progress and has become the highest contributed project in all of Joomla (on JoomlaCode.org) only behind Joomla itself.
In addition to our top contributors, a special thanks goes to our design lead Ron as well as Dragan, who also launched a site dedicated to free and commercial Kunena templates, our moderation team under the lead of Mike and Rich, as well as our active contributors xillibit, Janich, 810 and Sven who all work on Kunena more or less daily. Some member have come and gone and we are grateful for all contributions to the project. Many of you have joined our testers team and help us test new releases, some are helping us translate Kunena into over 30 languages. Mortti has dedicated himself to countless test reports.
Many other component developers like the Community Builder and JomSocial teams have helped us come up with better and more robust integrations and have also provided bug reports and fixes as well as suggestions for optimizations.
In addition a special thanks goes out to Louis, Andrew and Sam of the Joomla core team for helping us with many Joomla related issues. We have learned so much from these guys and others in the Joomla community.
Our thank you goes out to all members, helpers and contributors of the Kunena project. You have made a difference! This is to you and the next 2 years of Kunena evolution!
