These are exciting times. Over the past months more and more developers from the Joomla community have come together to take on a BIG project.

Some of us have been helping with FireBoard for a couple of months now, and all of us kept looking for ways to open up an important project like a native Joomla Forum component to the community. During the same time the FireBoard project got more and more closed down for the public. First the SVN, than the forums itself got locked.

For Open Source developers like us, that want to contribute to the community, this was not the way we thought this should head. In part because of that communication between developers and the community alike broke down and progress was no where nearly as fast as required to drive such a large project.

We strongly believe that a project like this cannot be run by a few individuals. It requires a larger collective of developers that are willing to share, learn from each other and the community. We are not doing this for financial reasons, we believe in a vision to build something great and to give back to the community. Many of us are seasoned software developers and architects that want to have an impact with what we do.

So here we are in January 2009 and after a few months of planning, the recent events surrounding FireBoard have helped us speedup our plans.

While we had no plans to create a legacy fork of a popular component, we also saw the need for the community to communicate and take care of ongoing issues, bug-fixes and future development. Together with some of the leading Joomla developers who helped build and shape Joomla 1.5 and soon to be 1.6 we came to the conclusion to found a new project. Well, that was the 'easy' part. 

Right after that we had to pick a name. Yeah - that Kunena thing. How the hell did we come up with it? We wanted to connect to the spirit of Joomla and other successful open source projects. We did not shoot for a flashy marketing name. It had to be reasonable short, mean something related to the project and so off we went to find THE name. Like Joomla and others we resorted to study the Swahili language for what could be a good choice in terms of meaning, sound of the name as well as minor details like: can we register a domain name like that.

Once you spend some time on that topic, your head starts to spin. There is no single right choice. In the end we ended up picking Kunena - Swahili for: To Speak

It is all about speaking and expressing your thoughts on the internet, especially on thousands of forums around the world. So To Speak it is. Kunena the foundation for a great open source implementation of a native Joomla Forum component.

There is lots of work to-do. We just pretty much finished the fork and through it fixed a couple hundred bugs of the old component. Version 1.0 is available for downloads, Version 1.1 is coming within the next 3-4 weeks. On top of that we are actively working on version 1.5 (Joomla 1.5 native) as well as laying the foundation for 2.0 (Joomla 1.6 native). Kunena 1.5 is targeted to come out within 2 months, no final plans for version 2.0

Much of our time line will depend on home much support we can activate from the community. We need your help fixing things that are broken, testing new lines of code, help with supporting the community of users out there as well as creating OUTSTANDING templates and good documentation.

It has been a stressful but fun couple of weeks to get us to this point. The more we make happen, the more motivated we get. So far it has been a small step into the right direction. With your help and support we will make it a huge leap for the Joomla community.

With that I let you get back to your day and hope to see you around a lot.

Thank you!

fxstein     

 

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