Kunena 1.6/1.7 Reflections

Details: Published: 04 October 2010

We did it! As of tonight - the closing night of Joomla Day West 2010 - the biggest one ever, hosted in the US - we have released Kunena 1.6.0 stable.

What a ride! We have been working hard for the last 9 months to bring you the best Kunena ever. The changelog file is more than 3500 (!) lines long.

A HUGE thanks goes to Matias who has delivered large portions of the new architecture, closely followed by xillibit who has become the second most active committer in 2010. If you have not seen the latest JoomlaCode.org stats (click here) - both are within the top 10 committers in all of Joomla in 2010. Matias is #3 and xillibit is in #7 overall position for 2010 - again this is for all of JoomlaCode.org!

Our lead committers are closely followed by myself, severdia, dragan (@quila), 810 and additional support came from the allmighty eddieajau, the infamous louis, sam and our team members sozzled, LittleJohn, LDA, TDP2, Mortti, Alakentu and rich.

Kunena has become a real community, 9 quarters of sustained development work has made Kunena the 3rd most active component of all of Joomla code and the top component for 2010. Kunena is not a one day wonder, its not commercial in any way and we are modeling our community more and more after Joomla itself.

And it is far from over. We will be contributing parts of Kunena into other Joomla projects - like our advanced build and install system, to allow ALL joomla developers, to leverage these complex subcomponents in there own work. In a session with Andrew Eddie and Azrul this weekend, we decided to start work on extension skeletons that contain all the proper basics including build scripts that will make extensions better.

Kunena 1.6.0 is a massive milestone for the Kunena project. But in addition to getting it stable we have already been busy on K 1.7. The new ACL is already done and has adapters for Joomla 1.6, JomSocial, Jextended controls and other ACL components, to support advanced ACL also under Joomla 1.5.

We have also backported the ACL functionality and will make it available with Kunena 1.6.1 in the upcoming weeks. This means Kunena finally gets full advanced ACL management for both K1.6.x and the next major release K1.7.

Skinner - our new self skinning template will get released shortly. We demonstrated our developer version of it this weekend at JoomlaDay West 2010 and the audience was in awe. Everybody wants the new template that blends itself into any existing Joomla site template.

Several of the big template designers have expressed strong interest in designing new Kunena templates based on the Kunena 1.6+ template engine. We expect to see more interesting templates to come out over the next weeks and months.

Kunena 1.7 will also get an advanced JomSocial integration with in group discussions powered by Kunena, ACL and privacy settings derived from JS groups, multiple category per group support and many more features. Many of which have already been coded in the past month.

Kunena 1.7 is also going to take performance to yet another level. We are implementing a newly designed database model, that will speed up sites with multi million posts/threads significantly.

We have also implemented a brand new bbcode parser, that will allow us to offer custom bbcode extensions and even more complex bbcodes. It fixes broken bbcode, is extremely fast and based of the OpenSource NBBC framework. We are also looking into making that parser available to all of Joomla through the Kunena system plug-in. Imagine to leverage Kunena bbcode tags and smilies in ALL your joomla content.

Last but not least more and more enterprises are picking Kunena 1.6 for their implementations. We are proud to be part of the eBay Joomla project that is delivering an internal social network for all of its employees based on Joomla, JomSocial and Kunena. And if you have not seen, GE Transportation just launched a brand new website powered by Joomla and Kunena 1.6.

There are already more than 100,000 Kunena 1.6 sites around the world - the day it goes stable. Adoption has been very strong and the project has never before seen better feedback from the community about our work and progress.

We encourage all of you to join in and contribute.

Our sincere THANK YOU go out to all of you that have helped and supported us in any way, shape or form!

Posts in discussion: Kunena 1.6/1.7 Reflections

laulaulau replied the topic:

13 years 5 months ago

Great work!

fixyourtech replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

I love kunena 1.6, great work
looking forward to further development

snilloconator replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

Keep up the excellent work K-Team!

I'm not sure if anyone has token that phrase the "K-Team" yet but I think it's suiting.

I'm just wondering who would be Murdock out of the bunch...? LOL All jokes aside, the Kunena team has out done itself and has come a very long way!!!! GREAT COMMUNITY GUYS AND GALS!

ke4obt replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

I would like to take this opportunity to say great job and thank you to the whole Kunena team.
As a blind Joomla! site owner and maintainer I am always looking to keep everything on my site accessible and the Kunena team has done it's self proud with Kunena 1.6.0.
Not only is the front-end totally accessible but so is the administration area.

I am now awaiting (with baited breath! )the release of Kunena 1.6.1 and the new Kunena Skinner template (aka (to me anyway) - The Chameleon).

Again, my most heart felt thanks to all the developers and moderators for there help, and a special thanks goes out to "M" (you know who you are) for all your time, effort and hours spent on skype helping me get things working properly as well as your recommendations, suggestions and art work.

THANK YOU

Caestor replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

hmmm!!

mijalis replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

I did offer my help twice ( here and here ) but nobody got back to me.
Sorry for reminding you, but I thought you were not aware of the importance of this issue.
Thanks again!

fxstein replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

We hear you loud and clear. We use the discuss bot here on the site and are seeing the issues. At the same time there are literally 100x more people that first need to get 1.6.x problems resolved. If you check the work and amount of hours we have been putting into this - as a free donation to the community, you will see that this is more than a full time job.
As soon as we can spare a couple hours away from helping the community get over the initial hurdles, we will focus on that. We did not ever have a discuss bot before, we shared the pre-release so to collect feedback and find issue. We see a lot of demand, but not always contributions that help.

Remember we don't own this as a product, we don't sell any portions of it, we are here to help each other and we will do so with as much time as we can afford away from our day jobs and families.
We said we will look into it once 1.6.0 gets stable enough to stand on its own and we stay to that.

Feel free to join in and help out in any way you can, but please don't remind us every day what else we should be doing.

Have a great day!

mijalis replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

The problem is that many people cannot upgrade to 1.6.0, because of the way discussbot behaves.
You also mentioned that this behavior should be fixed by the time that 1.6.0 goes stable:
www.kunena.com/forum/178-kunena-discuss-...it=10&start=10#62113

Thanks!

fxstein replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

As soon as we have 1.6.1 out there we will turn our attention to the modules and plugins. Just wanting to make the core stable and bug free first.

mijalis replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

That's very good news

Performance is a very important factor for all of us...
However, I would like to mention here that although it is very good that you guys always move fast forward, you shouldn't forget to fix the behavior of a very important plugin for kunena users, the discussbot:
www.kunena.com/forum/178-kunena-discuss-...it=10&start=20#65877
Thanks again!

fxstein replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

FYI - Progress on Kunena 1.7 is steady and we have already coded the majority of data model changes related to the extreme performance initiative we are working on. Early test results show that queries against 10-100x data volumes perform as quick as the current ones - if not better. We are using advanced indexing and materialization techniques that will boost extreme large sites to and beyond where the best and biggest forums out there can scale too. We are also looking at smart caching algorithms that could allow us to take this even further - all of course based on the Joomla 1.5 and 1.6 framework.
Joomla 1.6 support for both Kunena 1.6 and 1.7 is almost complete and we are just waiting for the Joomla 1.6 RC to fix the last remaining bugs.
It has been busy around here and many more things are in the making.

sozzled replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

"We will be contributing parts of Kunena into other Joomla projects - like our advanced build and install system, to allow ALL Joomla developers, to leverage these complex subcomponents in their own work."

Perhaps, of ALL the features that may go little noticed by most users of Kunena, this is by far the most significant achievement in my mind. I have said it before on several occasions, and I'll say it again, that the Kunena installation procedure is a new standard for installing Joomla extensions - it's a feature that many other big name developers are lacking and that is needed to make it not only easier, but make it worthwhile, for Joomla users to upgrade their extensions.

Overall, this was an amazing achievement by everyone who was involved and I feel honoured that I was able to make a small contribution to the project. Thank you.

DTP2 replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

Thank YOU guys. Keep up the great work!

MarkBoy81 replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

THANK YOU for developing Kunena.
And indeed, Kunena developers working along witz Azrul from JomSocial does really sound great!

woonydanny replied the topic:

13 years 6 months ago

In a session with Andrew Eddie and Azrul this weekend, we decided to start work on extension skeletons that contain all the proper basics including build scripts that will make extensions better.

this sounds great!!

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