Question Kunena 1.6.4 Released!

Introduction

The Kunena Team has now released Kunena 1.6.4 as a native Joomla extension for J! 1.5.23 and J! 1.6.3. This is a maintenance release for Kunena 1.6 and all users are recommended to upgrade to Kunena 1.6.4 (backup and testing are strongly recommended!).

K 1.6.4 makes all previous releases of Kunena obsolete and all users of prior Kunena releases are urged to upgrade as soon as possible.

In order to achieve better interoperability with both J! 1.5 and J! 1.6, a lot of work has focused on revising the default Kunena template. Some users of third-party templates written for older versions of Kunena will find that their templates may not work with this latest release because changes were necessary in order to fit with the new J! 1.6 CMS.

We continue to put a big emphasis on usability and ease of installation. 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. While all care has been taken to make the upgrade process run smoothly there will be unavoidable issues that may arise because of the way that some people may have individually customised Kunena to their own unique needs.

There are still a few outstanding matters that have prevented K 1.6 meeting all our expectations to take full advantage of all the features of J! 1.6. As with other Joomla extensions, the Kunena project is not alone in this situation. During our extensive testing of K 1.6.4 the project team has discovered several issues with the Joomla 1.6 core and these have been reported to the Joomla development team. Rather than wait for Joomla 1.7 to be released (expected some time in July this year) we decided that it is better now to release a version of Kunena that handles most of what Joomla 1.6 is capable of providing. There is still further work needed to complete this task and we're continuing to work with Joomla developers to resolve those outstanding matters. If you are in any doubt about whether J! 1.6 is right for you, you should test K 1.6.4 on J! 1.6.3. to form your own opinion of whether J! 1.6 is best for your needs or whether you should use something else.

At the same time as this release of K 1.6.4 we also announce the availability of add-on extensions for Kunena. These updated add-ons (together with the updated K 1.6.4 component) are available on the Download page.