Question CB vs. Kunena Profiles

Hi everyone,

I have been reading around these forums, trying to put together the different issues associated with CB vs. Kunena profiles. I am confused in a number of ways.

It seems that the Kunena crew is saying that going forward, all user data will be stored inside of Kunena, so as to avoid duplicate data. But I'm not quite sure how that avoids duplicates. Now there will be a CB profile, and a Kunena profile.

Additionally, I like the Kunena profile, but it occurs to me that there's some very simple things that could be done to make everything more smooth. I have Joomla 1.0.15, CB 1.2, and Kunena 1.0.8. If I set Kunena to use Kunena's profile in the settings, then why should users be allowed to change their email address and password in here? This is something that CB already handles, and now it is in 2 places.

I think that people shouldn't be able to update their passwords or email or name, AS an option. Because in my case, I want to keep management of those fields with CB, but use some Kunena fields like the signature, AIM name, etc.

I'm not sure if this is an odd request or not.

@vcardillo: yours is not an odd request at all; I think it touches on many of the fears, worries, concerns and doubts that many of us are feeling about the future of Community Builder and its ability to integrate with Kunena. Well done in putting the issue on the table.

In other discussions that we've had here, people have questioned the very need for Community Builder in a Joomla site that uses Kunena forums! In passing, I would strongly urge you to upgrade from Joomla 1.0.15 to 1.5.9 in order to take advantage of the considerable improvements made in relation to other aspects of Joomla; furthermore, there's no certainty that either CB nor Kunena will remain backwards-compatible with Joomla 1.0.x in future.

In our discussions we've touched on some of the user profiling features that Kunena seems to be usurping from Community Builder. There has been some noise made about using Kunena's login module in preference to other login products, including CB. Kunena provides a "list users" function and, as you said, the means to change your email and password.

I'm wondering if Kunena has evolved beyond its niche product role (as a forum extension to Joomla) into other areas that were the traditional territory of products like Community Builder?

In our discussion entitled Is Community Builder worth installing? I canvassed some of the reasons why I chose CB for my web development:

• CB's "tabbed" profiles;
• integration with other products, such as JoomGallery, Acajoom and Kunena;
• user registration;
• extensible data fields; and
• it's free.

In other words, CB was a good choice as a community management system.

In our discussion entitled Signature, ordering and viewtype migration script for CB we've touched on the value of using CB's user profile data and concluded that both the Community Builder development team and the Kunena development team have questions that need to be answered. What is particularly disturbing is that both development teams have been tight-lipped on plans to better integrate their products with one another. In fact, it seems to me, neither team appears to be talking to the other. It's strikingly apparent that neither this website nor Joomlapolis have made any announcement about a timetable for harnessing the products together. As users, we're being politely asked to sit tight, and wait patiently. :blink:

I believe CB's development team needs to wake up because, I think, they're in danger of being outmanoeuvred by other players in the community management game among whom, it could be said, Kunena is beginning to emerge. I could be wrong (and I hope I am) but that's what the evidence suggests.

Kunena is not an "enemy" for CB, nor for any o other community managers, we may be their best friends

Historically, forums, evolved from BBS, have been heart of communities, right now communities are evolving with "micro forums" inside a community, as we see in social sites as facebook were you have your walls, and so, but mainstream way of mass communication in a community are forums.

This is the niche of kunena, giving an open arena for users to communicate with the rest, not caring on who is freind of the reader.

Obviously, kunena NEEDS to ahve some kind of profile system, as is needed in order to recognize the users for a clear chat, but we don't want to be a community where you can create your groups and so, WE WANT COMMUNITIES TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF WHAT KUNENA CAN OFFER TO THEM, and walk alongside them.

In fact, it seems to me, neither team appears to be talking to the other. It's strikingly apparent that neither this website nor Joomlapolis have made any announcement about a timetable for harnessing the products together.

On the launch of kunena, we had talks with both CB and jomsocial teams to see how we could improve, not just kunena, but their extensions taking advantage of it, and I think we're on the right track, we already have basic integration of both components, but you must understand, than although being very important (is on the top 3 requested things in uservoice, 1.5 nativeness, and stability/performance/bugfreeness are way more important. And we're working hard for that.

We are triing our best to integrate kunena with both extensions (the rest don't seem to have much interest in us), but is not just Kunena team work, notice also we had (and still ahve) plans for an API for powerful and easy integration between kunena and the rest of the world, but 1.1 release has been put on hold to favour 1.5 nativeness (release 1.5), this doesn't mean we have changed our mind about the issues we planned to adress in 1.1, just that 1.1 is deprecated, and the plans we had for it, will be after 1.5, maybe for 1.6 or however we decide to call it

From my point of view, counting the ammount of work still to do, making a tight integration with CB or JS, to drop it as soon as the new powerful API is build, is a waste of time/work.

Hear-hear and well said, johnnydement. I'm particularly impressed with

We are trying our best to integrate Kunena with both [JS and CB] extensions (the rest don't seem to have much interest in us), but is not just Kunena team work ... [our] plans for an API for powerful and easy integration between Kunena and the rest of the world ... [have] been put on hold to favour 1.5 nativeness [but] this doesn't mean we have changed our mind about [those other] issues.

Even if Kunena were to limit the integration choices to the two suppliers you mentioned - JomSocial and Community Builder - it's only of value while there's interest and support from those quarters. Although I wasn't suggesting that Kunena was creating enemies in other camps, it is fairly evident that Kunena's features are fast outpacing those that are provided by CB and there's a risk of the "tail wagging the dog". In other words the design of Kunena's user profiling will dictate how other developers need to design their products in order to keep up.

We do appreciate and value the work done by Kunena's development team, especially in the area of improving Fireboard's capabilities and reliability. I am in total agreement that making Kunena fully Joomla 1.5 "native"-compliant must be the primary focus at this time and that other bug-fixes, enhancements or benefits will have to wait until that is achieved. But, in saying that, let's concentrate on the Joomla compatibility issues and not increase the growing divergence between Kunena and other interests, like CB.

I think that this is a very tricky topic. For me, on the site I am currently working on, I am stuck with CB, because it is the only thing that integrates with the Account Expiration Control component. In reality, the only reason I really need CB is to extend the registration fields. That's pretty much it. I have never needed or uses any of its other features.

Sometimes the name of CB strikes me as odd, because I feel as though in some ways it isn't so great at creating communities. My personal opinion is that CB, in and of itself, doesn't really create an online community. And that's where forums come in.

If Kunena were able to come up with a way to hook into the registration system, and allow additional fields to be added, then I think it would immediately herald Kunena above many other products. And what's more, it would be filling a huge demand. There's just too much of a disconnect right now between all these products. A user's profile should be a user's profile, period. It should exist in one place, be managed in one place, and shared across all of the components that want access to that profile.

Just to toss another idea out there, but as I was writing this, I couldn't help but think that a very simple solution would be for Joomla itself to own this functionality. If Joomla had extensible user profile fields, and expanded the default set by adding common things, then other products like Kunena could simply tap into those fields. There'd be no need for all of this contention caused by every product out there having their own set of "profile info".

I think that's the real solution here. Joomla needs to step up to the plate and create common ways for different applications to all share the same data. Novel idea, eh?

It just shouldn't be this difficult to get different applications to share the same data, with all that data managed in one place. It's a very common concept, and in my eyes, it's a huge negative mark for Joomla. Yes, I love Joomla. And yes, I'm a PHP programmer with plenty of MySQL skills. But I don't care -- because I still shouldn't have to run queries on the database involving data migration, just to get a signature to work.

In J 1.5 you can extend the user object: community.joomla.org/september-2008/arti...15-kevin-devine.html .

Ah cool. I did not know that because I have no done a 1.5 website yet.

Well, then I suppose my question is this: Is the Kunena team considering taking advantage of this in a 1.5 native app?