Details

Published: 04 April 2009

The Kunena Team is proud to announce the immediate availability of Kunena 1.0.9. This is a security release and all users are urged to upgrade immediately.

This release addresses a number of issues. A legacy security issue inherited form the Fireboard installer has been fixed as well as pagination issues and RSS.

Highlights of the release include a new, powerful advanced search. Users can now customize their searching in a variety of ways, including authors & titles. A tight collaboration with the Community Builder team is also a great new feature which allows CB users to enjoy stronger integration than ever before.

Additionally, a large number of minor fixes and enhancements have been included in this release. Please see the Kunena Read Me for this release to view the full list of changes and improvements:

http://docs.kunena.com/index.php/Kunena_1.0.9_Read_Me

On top of the Kunena 1.0.9 release, the Kunena Team has been hard at work on a Kunena 1.5 release, which runs natively on Joomla 1.5.x. We are thrilled to announce the immediate availability of Kunena 1.5.0 Alpha. This is a test release which will automatically upgrade any Kunena 1.0.x installation to Kunena 1.5 and shouldn't be used on live production sites. We encourage users to test out this great new native version and provide us with feedback to make Kunena the best forum for Joomla.

The Kunena Team

www.kunena.org

Details

Published: 18 February 2009

It has been done! Kunena 1.0.8 goes stable!

Approximately 1 month after the public release of Kunena 1.0.7b, over 1,000 registered users, and over 11,000 downloads later, Kunena 1.0.8 goes stable.

We are proud to present you with the most advanced integrated forum solution available for Joomla. While we originally had no plans to release Kunena 1.0, the events surrounding the shutdown of FireBoard caused us to rethink our plans and the development team invested a gigantic effort to make the impossible happen. In less than 4 weeks after the initial launch of Kunena.com and countless late nights that turned into early mornings, we are proud to call it ready.

The vast majority of known issues have been fixed. This is the most secure, most stable, best integrated, and most optimized version of Joomlaboard, FireBoard and now Kunena—EVER.

Due to the severity level of the critical security vulnerabilities fixed, all prior users of FireBoard and Kunena are urged to immediately upgrade!

Please check the detailed release notes at: docs.kunena.org/index.php/Kunena_1.0.8_Read_Me for detailed information about the changes, additions and fixes that went into this release.

In addition to releasing the stable version of Kunena 1.0.8, we are also announcing the launch of a dedicated community-driven documentation project for Kunena. Effective immediately, you can check out the beginnings of the project at: docs.kunena.org

All this work would not have been possible without the effort of many individuals and the entire community here at Kunena.com. We want to thank all of you who have helped us make this happen, who have given us their trust, and who spoke out on our behalf nearly everywhere around the world.

Just four weeks ago, Kunena wasn't in the public eye and it has quickly became the largest and frequented forum component site for Joomla. For us, this is only the beginning. We know you are anxiously waiting for a Joomal 1.5 native version and now our goal is to go back to working on it—after a brief break to catch our breath from these hard weeks. We all will need a chance to regain our energy from the many late nights that have taken their toll on our lives and families.

We hope you enjoy the new release and use it to build new, exiting websites for your communities!

Thank you for supporting our community!

The Kunena Team
www.kunena.org

Details

Published: 11 February 2009

You may be wondering what has been happening behind the curtains since the Kunena 1.0.7 beta was released two weeks ago.

Though we promised to deliver our first stable version over a week ago, we've unfortunately found some major bugs inherited from FireBoard and all of them were serious enough to delay the release. While fixing those issues, more and more bug reports came in from our early adopters and they all needed to be fixed as well. So our dedicated team has been working day and night to keep our promise of quality to the community.

In the last two weeks, we've fixed over 50 bugs in Kunena 1.0.7b. We have also added 15 small features, removed 3 deprecated/broken features, and made over 30 additional code improvements. Most of the bugs reported by users have already been fixed in our latest developer builds.

Our goal is not to fix every little bug before we release (otherwise there would be an even longer wait for a release), but to make some major progress on getting a stable codebase. The release date is currently set for Monday.

Details

Published: 27 January 2009

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