Kunena 1.6/1.7 Reflections
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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.
Read more: Kunena 1.6/1.7 Reflections
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looking forward to further development
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!
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
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!
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!
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!
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.
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.
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!!
Kunena 1.6.0 Stable Released!
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Introduction
The Kunena Team is excited to announce the release of Kunena 1.6.0 stable. This is the final release for Kunena 1.6 and is stable enough to be used on live production websites. We encourage all users of prior Kunena releases to upgrade to 1.6 (backup and testing are strongly recommended!).
Since the third release candidate of Kunena 1.6, the Kunena team has been focused on fixing over 100 bugs and issues including CSS fixes, IE7 and IE8 compatibility, usability issues, API issues, html validation issues, new modules and plug-ins and updating languages translations.
Kunena 1.6 marks a major milestone for the Kunena Project. A long list of open source contributors have committed over 2500 changes and have helped make Kunena the leading forum solution for both Joomla 1.5 and 1.6. A long list of new features in addition to various optimizations and code restructuring have resulted in the most advanced version of Kunena to date.
We continue to put a big emphasis on usability and ease of installation. Therefore, the installer has been further enhanced to allow for multiple installation and upgrade options. It performs incremental steps to avoid timeouts on slower hosts. It automatically performs actions such as taking the forum offline during the installation or upgrade and re-enables it after completing the install.
Kunena now supports Joomla 1.6 style languages files that are backward compatible with Joomla 1.5. Multiple languages are included in the base install packages and more will be available soon. They can also be installed separately. Kunena 1.6 also support multiple languages to be installed on a single system and, together with Joomla, allows users to select their preferred language.
Templates have now been separated from the underlying code, which allows for version-independent template development. Templates can embed various options that can be set via the included template manager (e.g. avatar position on left, right, top, or bottom in the new default template, Blue Eagle).
The Kunena Team is fully committed to Joomla 1.6 and beyond and a number of modules have been developed to lay the groundwork for future releases of Joomla.
Read more: Kunena 1.6.0 Stable Released!
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MooTools and Kunena 1.6
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There has been a lot of talk why Kunena switched to MooTools for our Javascript framework needs and why, in particular, with version 1.2.x that comes default with Joomla 1.5.19+ and 1.6.0.
I'd like to shine some light on the background of the ins and outs, clear up some confusion, and maybe provide some insight into why we believe this is one of the better decisions we have made since the start of Kunena.
When Kunena 1.0 started from the ashes of Fireboard, Joomlaboard, Simpleboard and the like, it came with Javascript based on the very popular jQuery framework. We enhanced and developed more and more features using jQuery, upgraded the libraries and kept moving forward with that direction.
More and more often we would get reports about broken Javascript and loss of the bbcode editor, quickreply and minimizer functionality on various sites. For almost a year, we tried to develop solutions to prevent our jQuery libraries from crashing with other jQuery libraries from various templates and third-party components. As it turns out jQuery (as all other frameworks would probably do) crash when on a given page two different versions of the same library are included.
So we wrote code with that between components like JomSocial and Kunena would result in the load of only a single copy of the libraries.
After dealing with these issues for many months and countless forum threads that last to this very day and after talking to various Joomla core developers and architects we came to the conclusion that we have been at this totally wrong for the longest time.
Read more: MooTools and Kunena 1.6
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So anyway I have been out of the loop for a little while, so am I correct in that Mootools is now the 'must use' or 'recommended' js language to now use over jQuery for Joomla as a whole with (or without) Kunena?
If so I better get started on converting my site over to Mootools.
Is there a way for me to find out what plug-ins/extensions I have that depend on jQuery?
Thanks
GW
Kunena Site Updates
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It was time to overhaul our site a little bit. With all the work that we recently put into Kunena 1.6, the site layout started to get a little stale. There are only so many hours in a day 
.
Anyway here is what we did:
- Updated main menu: We resorted the main menu to bring more emportant entries closer to the front. We renamed KED to Extensions to have one acronym less out there. Community became People - similar to how Joomla itself is setup.
- Updated Kunena Extension Directory: (www.kunena.com/ked) sporting a new introduction and links to the new Terms ofService article we have created.
- Updated Kunena Extension Directory content: To differentiate various listings and their compatibility better, we have added a short K1.5 and K1.6 prefix to the listings. This should make it easier to find what you are looking for.
