Question K 1.0 / K 1.5: Read this if you are template designer

When you contribute your own theme, please remember to tell Kunena version it was designed to work with.

In Kunena 1.0 (and in Kunena 1.5) templates contain a lot code and templates need to be fixed for every new Kunena release. I'm really sorry about this -- it's our legacy from FireBoard.

Default theme is considered obsolete (it will be removed soon) and it does not contain all the new features, so I recommend all designers to use default_ex instead.

There is one problem. As Kunena 1.0 was meant to be compatible with FireBoard, all default_ex based themes need a copy of all files from default_ex template to work as designed. This basically means that your themes need to be changed for all new releases -- in order to get all bug fixes in them, too.

If you keep your theme simple (you did not change php files), making new version is easy: just overwrite all php files.

But if you change many files, you need to mark all your changes so, that you can take the new Kunena release and apply all your changes into the new version of default_ex theme. Another possibility is to merge changes in Kunena to your template.

I think this has been suggested already, but we really need to implement css styled buttons rather than .gifs , in a future release, so that templates can be used for all languages easily.

I disagree. Template designers need to supply editable image files and fonts along with their reskins to facilitate multi-language usage. Graphic elements are a vital part of templating. Reducing them to CSS only diminishes that.

I disagree too, both things should be done if possible, for instance, if my site is not multilingual, I may prefer to use a simple gif/png in my language, that will give no problem in whatever the case, that having to mess with css.
For multilingual sites css are optimal, but not for single language one

I agree with Spocks proposal. When the buttons are only CSS styled rather than gifs, you have much more possibilities.

With CSS styled navigation, you have both: buttons as (background)graphic (take text-indent -3000px) and SEO and Screenreader are your friend and second you can put the buttons as Text, with other CSS styles around.

I guess it doesn't matter. If you are the designer and prefer purely CSS then you can change the base code and CSS to eliminate the graphic altogether. Same with pure images or a combination of both. I've done this elsewhere so it really isn't up to the devs this time. It's the designers preference.