Question Menu & Itemid issue...

CB 1.2.3.

I gave up and installed K 1.5.12.

Ive been using Joomla for 6yrs now and this was the most difficult upgrade I have ever seen.
Was looking forward to helping squash bugs on the new version of K and have a very large group of understanding users when it comes to me wanting to expand our site and provide more options.

For YEARS the users have been begging for polls & private forums, when they learned polls were in the RC, they were willing.

I worry the new version of Kunena is only being tested in vanilla clean installs with zero existing data.

I will wait and perhaps attempt again later down the road but we are actually losing features as we continue with Kunena (latest post module, etc).

Always loved Simpleboard, Fireboard, and now Kunena but a bridge would be easier to deal with then what I have experienced with 1.6rc over the past 3 days.

I'm sorry that you feel the way that you do.

Developing and testing K 1.6 has been a long and trying time for all of us involved in the project. In my own case, I must have spent about 6 months trying to get my head around the new features and the new design and, after I thought I understood things better, to write about what I'd learned . If there's one thing that I learned, it's that K 1.6 represents a significant paradigm shift from what users of K 1.5 (and its predecessors) have been accustomed to. If there's one piece of advice that I can give to users, it's to try things out on a test site, first, just to see how different things are.

Even so, I have successfully upgraded from K 1.5 -> K 1.6 (and I preserved all the old data from the K 1.5 site) but it wasn't easy in the first instance. I had to upgrade some other components that I'd been using for a couple of years and I also used the opportunity to retire a few others that I no longer had much need for. But, the upgrade went smoothly after I'd done the necessary preparation work.

Alex R wrote:

I worry the new version of Kunena is only being tested in vanilla clean installs with zero existing data

I would be worried, too, if that were the case. But the reality is that Kunena has been tested by a team of about a dozen users, some of them using "clean" installs and some of them after upgrading existing K 1.5 installations and, so, I'll have to differ with you on that point.

Alex R wrote:

I will wait and perhaps attempt again later down the road but we are actually losing features as we continue with Kunena (latest post module, etc).

The project team has every intention of expanding Kunena with a range of add-ons. Some of them will replace those functions that are familiar to many users, like the latest post module and the discussbot. Again, the reality is that those old K 1.5 add-ons are incompatible with the new version and, even before the dust has settled on the completion of K 1.6, some of the developers of those old add-ons have walked away and left users of K 1.5 without the means to use those add-ons with K 1.5.

The foremost objective of the project team is to get K 1.6 to a stable point. As time permits, work will also occur to put in place the add-ons that people have requested. We're sorry, but there are only so many hours in the day and only so many experienced, willing hands available to make these things happen as quickly as we would all like.

We also hope that the experience of RC1 won't be too stressful for the majority of users and that most of the installation difficulties will be ironed out before announcing K 1.6.0 stable release. There will, however, always be the occasional exception.

My post reads more negative then I am feeling.

My server is running CentOS w/ Plesk.
According to them, the php version required is still in beta.
So to just get to the point where I COULD install K1.6 was not a simple task.

I arrived at Joomla from a design & marketing background, over time I learned very basic elements of php & java. I am by no means a pro at any of this but I am not necessarily a 'noob' either.

My hopes are high for Kunena and currently have it running on almost a dozen sites and have no desire to see it fail or its userbase to decline.

My desire to give users the features they have been begging for over the years (polls, multiple images, etc) that they know exist in other forum packages is what encouraged me to attempt with an RC.

Alex R wrote: Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 177915 bytes) in /var/www/vhosts/vodguild.com/httpdocs/plugins/system/sef.php on line 73

32MB is not enough memory for PHP if you have a lot of components and modules in your site. Running Kunena and CB together you need at least 64MB to make it work reliably. So you need to raise your PHP memory limit or you need to disable CB integration and/or remove modules from the pages.

PHP parser eats a lot of memory -- I have never understood why it can use so much memory to do relatively simple tasks. Just including a file with a class (but not calling any functions from it) can sometimes cost 1MB of memory. Maybe PHP loads libraries into memory when it parses the code and the memory usage comes from that, I don't know.

Increased memory usage in Kunena compared to K1.5 comes from the tighter integration. We load more libraries from CB and we cache more data to memory.

Alex R wrote: According to them, the php version required is still in beta.

Actually PHP version that is required has been available for almost three years. And to add on that, older PHP versions are not supported anymore and contain severe security bugs. Our minimum requirement is PHP 5.2, but you should always use one of the latest versions.

Kunena checks PHP version and stops installation with error if it's too old.

Your issue is in the PHP configuration. To run large applications in PHP you need to change default settings.

docs.kunena.com/index.php/Technical_Requirements

php memory_limit >= 64M

It's actually interesting on how you have managed to run K1.5.12 together with CB 1.2.3 with 32MB of memory as most users would already have seen occasional white pages.

Alex R wrote: So to just get to the point where I COULD install K1.6 was not a simple task.

It looks like your only issue was your PHP configuration not meeting the requirements (I don't mean our recommendation -- memory usage depends on your site), so it looks like it would be safe to try again after raising the limit. 40MB could be enough, but I would play it safe..

Thank you Matias & Sozzled, the memory limit WAS my problem.

Feel like an idiot fighting with it for 3 days being too stubborn to bother you guys with more help requests.