Question Why bother with "native" Joomla forum?

That's fine! I'm really looking forward to 1.5 native compatibility. Kunena seems to be the only component I'm working with that requires me to still use the Legacy plugin.

What a great post GoremanX..

I know it's not supposed to be funny but I lol :laugh:

If all components would have "use joomla css?" *big YES flashy button*" the internet would be a better place indeed

And .png rocks.

I suggest you put your ideas and feature wishes into the user voice section of our site. It is there for that very specific reason.

While I agree with most of what is being said here, I have to say that the majority of users want other improvements first. We have limited resources and have to pick the most important, most sought after features.

In addition it is going to be hard to make a universal template for Kunena that will work with any Joomla template out there. Many template have very unique CSS styles.

As for pngs: They are awesome unless you have IE6 users - transparent pngs simply don't work properly in IE6 and the so called fixes that some template providers offer make your site extremely slow loading and will interfere with flash based things as well as simple Google Maps.

There are a lot of tradeoffs we all have have to make to make a component like Kunena work for a large community of users out there.

A lot more can be done, time permitting. If you have solutions to these issues, we encourage you to contribute to this open source project. We welcome any help we can get.

I have not made a post yet BUT after browsing while babysitting my nephews i stumbled onto this one and said "YES! i need to post here"

I am not gonna deny i agree with "GoremanX" his idea behind a "TRUE" Joomla! board is what i have always wanted. I started on phpNuke,phpNuke Evolution,phpNuke Platinum,ect. And they all had themed forums that matched. I don't think ANYONE in there right mind would want to not go for this BUT the way you brought it in here made you sound like i am sorry to say this but a jackass man. The guy who said get your money back is right... We don't pay for this and honestly i think Fireboard was the best component for Joomla and am proud to see some people that are going to dedicate true time to it take over. BUT we can't expect a full force forum system right off the bat.... And that is what you sounded like at the beginning of your post.

HOWEVER i am excited someone finally stood up and said something... When using FB i felt lost i felt like no one cared at all. SO this is something i think people would freak over. IF you guys go to the route you won't be just making Kunena bigger BUT you will help improve Joomla! as a whole.

I do agree that security and other addons are top of the list though. I am fine with themeing the defaults to my liking for now as it's not a big thing.

Anyways just telling how it is and even though i didn't like how you sounded bro, YOU SPOKE THE TRUTH!

This is an excellent discussion. However, the topic title might be off-putting to many people browsing through the list of recent discussions.

"Why bother with [a] 'native' Joomla forum?" The problem, here, is with the word "native".

This discussion isn't about the integration of Kunena with Joomla 1.5 running in native mode. It doesn't mean we're a discussing some forum product that's "native" to Joomla (that is "developed by www.joomla.org ") because there isn't one. We're also not discussing the installation of third-party products to cooperate with Joomla's "native" templating scheme because, again, there isn't one.

However, there are templates that are shipped with the Joomla installation kit, like JA_Purity. People are free to adapt these to suit their purposes, or to install others and adapt those, and so forth. So, perhaps a better way of describing this discussion is:

integrating a third-party forum component (like Kunena) with Joomla's built-in mechanism to display content (namely, the site's default template style)

That's a helluva mouthful to condense into just a few words!

As I indicated in my earlier posting, there are a lot of "legacy issues" that the developers of Kunena have to wrestle with. If we look at the development of Joomla 1.0 -> 1.5 as a parallel, there were similar issues in rendering content style.

For example, many earlier Joomla modules/components/plugins rendered their contents as TABLEs. Joomla 1.5 has gradually moved away from this approach and become more "table-less", by making greater use of DIVs. In a similar way, Kunena was based on Fireboard which was designed to work in the Joomla 1.0 world. Kunena 1.0.x still carries a lot of that Joomla 1.0 "baggage". (I should add, the differences between Joomla 1.0 and 1.5 are far more extensive than merely changing from TABLEs to DIVs, but it helps to put a historical context on the discussion.)

Perhaps this old Joomla thinking is best stated, without offence to Matias who wrote

... all themes are a legacy from the FB, and most of the fixes made into them are relatively minor -- just to fix xhtml incompatibilities and to import some changes from our own themes to Kunena.

(The emphasis is mine)

GoremanX raises some very important issues that need to be strategically addressed in future releases of Kunena. I believe it's important, at this time, to attain Kunena's stability, if not in Joomla 1.0/1.5 "legacy" mode, then certainly in Joomla 1.5 "native" mode. This is far more important, and has been acknowledged by the Kunena development team, than enhancing Kunena's look-and-feel or range of features. In fact, while we're eagerly awaiting a stable Kunena implementation, we may have to lose certain things (like the "threaded" view) to reach stage where we can address other things like presentation.

I also don't think that GoremanX is saying that presentation is the most important thing for the next release of Kunena, but that it is definitely one of the most important things that the development team should have in their strategic outlook.

Lastly, I hasten to add, in my opening remarks I used the phrase "integration of Kunena with Joomla". Deploying Kunena as a forum tool for a Joomla website isn't a case of integrating it; it's more like plugging it in. It's an extension but, in it's current form, it's not truly integrated with a Joomla website's default look-and-feel and that's, I think, what's at the centre of this discussion. I'm sure that 100% integration with Joomla is a design aim of the Kunena developers and, in time, it will be claim that can be defended.

Let's hear more!