Summary
It has been decided to release a new minor version to be known as Kunena 1.7. The purpose of this article is to inform all members of the community of this decision. This article discusses why a new minor version release is considered the most appropriate way to introduce these changes at this time and what this means for the Kunena project roadmap.
K 1.7 does not mean that you need to have J! 1.7 installed in order to run it. It is important to understand that K 1.7 will operate on all supported versions of Joomla, namely, J! 1.5.23, J! 1.6.6 and J! 1.7.0 and beyond (but not beyond J! 2.5). K 1.7 will make obsolete all previous versions of Kunena. Support for K 1.5 and K 1.6 will cease one month after the release of this new version. It is planned to introduce K 1.7 soon (towards the end of August 2011).
K 1.7 will implement four new features and a number of fixes for K 1.6.5.
For all intents and purposes, K 1.7 will not be significantly different to K 1.6 in terms of how it's installed or how it functions. For the most part, K 1.7 will be backward compatible with K 1.6 but not in all respects. The differences between K 1.7 and K 1.6 are summarised in a table at the end of this article.