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 Kunena 1.5 resulting in the transitional software known as Kunena 1.6 (now Kunena 1.7). With the end of Joomla 1.5 in sight and with Joomla 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 Kunena 1.7. Kunena 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 Kunena 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.
As I outlined in Kunena Roadmap 2012, we had hoped to make a public demonstration of Kunena 2.0 available before the end of March this year. Circumstances changed and, unfortunately, we were unable to meet that target. A number of outstanding issues still have not been resolved — you can see the full list of these at GitHub (our collaborative source code repository) — but we many of these are "cosmetic" and do not impact on the overall functionality of the product. These problems do not interfere with the usability of Kunena in a live production environment — such as here — but they will cause problems if people downloaded a beta version and expected it to work just as well as what they now have; or worse, if people expected Kunena 2.0 beta could be used as a viable replacement for what they now have!
Foremost, therefore, is our warning that no beta software release is supported and no beta software release should be used on a production website unless you have comprehensive support in place to handle unexpected failures.
A list of Kunena 2.0's features (compared with other versions of Kunena) is given in Kunena Features. For demonstration purposes, some of these features have not been implemented in the version that will be used in the upcoming changes to this website. For example, it has not been possible to show people some of the really cool new template features; also, a number of Kunena add-ons may not be ready in time for when the changeover occurs. We expect to resolve these issues over the coming weeks and we ask for people's patience to accept that we can't always have everything we would like to have.
People may not notice a lot of difference in the forum after the changes take place. The template will still look the same, the categories will still be organised the same way but you can be assured that there's a lot that's happened behind the scenes. For starters, performance will improve and it will continue to get better as more things are fixed. While people may not see many differences in the front end, there are a many changes that have been made to the forum administration.
In the coming weeks there will also be changes in the way that the categories on the forum are organised. We hope that we will make things easier for people to find what they're looking for in a hurry.
Some of the problems we've had with the search facility will also be fixed because of the new version. Several parts of Kunena that did not work before have been fixed but, as with any new software, there's always the possibility if introducing new errors. That's where everyone's help and patience in reporting problems they find at the "new, improved" Kunena website will really pay dividends as we continue to work towards for a stable public release of Kunena 2.0.
We hope that you will enjoy the new-look Kunena. I guess the question that many of you may now be asking is "When will these changes be taking place?" My answer is the time-honoured "soon".
