Mirage and Joomla Bootstrap, Thinking Forward
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There have been a few questions asked about why Kunena did not release a new template for Kunena version 2.0. As well as these, we understand that people would also like to know about Kunena Team's position in relation to the future of Joomla and the support of Bootstrap. We like to share with you how we are thinking forward for Kunena's design.
Kunena team members have been actively reviewing Kunena's current design. It was decided over a year ago that Kunena needed improvement to meet current web design practices including utilising new HTML5 and CSS standards, improving the perception about how website users should be able to interact in a web-based discussion forum context, and to draw Kunena closer to Joomla.
But how to do this? How to achieve a recognisable User Interface (UI) that is more flexible, adaptive and can deploy the software’s features more quickly while, at the same time, avoiding design conflicts with the other design practices in the “Joomlaverse”? How to improve the perception about how Kunena should be used?
Read more: Mirage and Joomla Bootstrap, Thinking Forward
This topic outlines what is involved and the general concept about the Mirage template. It's good to know these things. People can follow the progress on GitHub. Kunena is open source software and the development activity is open to anyone to observe and interact as much (or as little) as they want to or as they are capable of doing.
anyone had a look on github?
Kunena 2.0 Released
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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.
Read more: Kunena 2.0 Released
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.
Yes. Please see K 2.0 Upgrade Guide .JSene wrote: Can I upgrade from Kunena 1.7.x to 2.0.x just installing the packages?
Revving Up for Kunena 2.0
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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.
Read more: Revving Up for Kunena 2.0
... doesn't leave us much time to give to providing frequent progress reporting.
If anyone (with a background in public-relations/communication) would like to step forward and offer to assist us, we would greatly appreciate the help. People can contact any member of the Kunena team at any time with such offers of assistance.
I see the dates have slipped which is fairly normal and to be expected with free software.
But it would be useful to see a revised roadmap to help in planning what to use for future projects.
Kunena Roadmap 2012
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The following table oulines the roadmap for the Kunena Project for 2012.
The timings given in the following table are appoximate and subject to change depending on availability of people who have given their time voluntarily to make Kunena the best web forum component for Joomla.
| JOOMLA | KUNENA | |
|---|---|---|
| March 2012 | K 2.0 beta public release | |
| April 2012 | Joomla 1.5 reaches end-of-life | |
| May 2012 | K 2.0 public stable release. This will also be the last version that offers compatibility with J! 1.5 and J! 2.5 | |
| August 2012 | K 1.7 reaches end-of-life and support will cease for that series | |
| September 2012 | Joomla 3.0 released | K 3.0 beta public releas |
| November 2012 | K 3.0 public stable release. It is likely that K 2.0 will not work with J! 3.0 | |
| January 2013 | K 2.0 reaches end-of-life and support will cease for that series. |
Importantly, following the release of K 1.7.0 last year, no support will be offered for installations running K 1.6.x or any add-ons (including third-party templates) written for K 1.6. Over the coming months, topics that discussed these older, outdated versions will be systematically archived from the forum and locked. We understand that, for some people, the task of upgrading software will be difficult but these decisions have been taken in the interests of the vast majority of users who want to move forward and keep up-to-date as Kunena moves forward in line with ongoing activities occurring within the Joomla community as a whole.
Equally importantly, people are encouraged to read the technical requirements article in the Wiki and to begin the process now of upgrading to J! 1.5.25 (including the removal of any J! 1.0 extensions that require the use of "legacy mode") or to migrate to J! 2.5 before support for older versions of Joomla disappears.
... several days ago they released a security update for for 2.0 ... and indicated they are now working on 3.0 ...