Question Why integrate Kunena with Jomsocial?

This may seem like a silly question but I have discussing this with my biz partner that relates specifically to the need for integration.

A new clients website previously used Community Builder with Kunena. However the site was not designed very well and the integration is "confusing" to say the least. Also Kunena did not seem to be set up correctly based on the clients desires. They felt there were features lacking that Kunena obviously has but were not implemented. The site is several years old and has never been updated.

We are currently migrating the site to Joomla 1.7 and Jomsocial instead of CB (for various reasons I won't go into). However my partner feels there is no need to use Kunena. He feels that Jomsocial can do "the same thing but in a different way". I am not totally convinced but starting to see his point. After looking at all the features of both JS and Kunena, I sort of kind of can see why someone would want to use a "BBS" type discussion format like Kunena along with JS.

This however, begs the question "Why use Jomsocial?". Why use both? Why are people using Community Builder or Jomsocial along with Kunena? Kunena could almost be used entirely on it's own? I can see how JS has a familiar "Facebook" look and feel to it. Is that the only reason?

To be honest all of my experience with online discussions has always been BBS style products, like PHPbb or similar. Is this accurate? Does a product like Jomsocial just not fullfill the "BBS" style discusion and organization that many people are use to? Is this something the site members could "learn to get use to" instead?

Not knocking Kunena. I think it looks great and it would actually save me time to just move it to the new site and not try to "replicate it" in Jomsocail. I would just like some feedback on the need for both.

-vern

heyvern wrote: I think it looks great and it would actually save me time to just move it to the new site and not try to "replicate it" in Jomsocail. I would just like some feedback on the need for both.

-vern

I think it is about the needs of the clients. Kunea is good for a client support. As for me I never would like to be part of facebook. But I like to be part of a special interest community.

I think the text editor in Kunea as well as the ubsability is much more better than WBB. PHPBB seems a little antiquated.

Best wishes
Benny

I just saw this topic and it raises a good question: should you use Kunena or something else?

If you need a forum or you have a busy discussion going on, then the answer is obvious. You cannot have good discussions in social media as they are designed to keep contact to individuals, not to host interesting discussions between many people.

On the other hand if your site doesn't need to have discussions where everyone can participate, you should probably not install Kunena and use some other commenting software that fits better for that purpose.

But do you need both? Well, that's also something that needs to be answered. You can get extra features out of Kunena if you integrate to social components. One of the nicest is to be able to have forum categories where you can join and resign (or even invite people). We are adding more logic into Kunena to do that better, but currently you need either JomSocial or GroupJive to do that.

I have been going back and forth with this same question myself. There are some things I really do like about Jomsocial and CB, but the JomSocial/CB to Kunena integration is still quite "messy" in my opinion, and I feel like it adds confusion for users.

In my opinion, the big advantage in using one of the community/social mods (CB or JomSocial) along with Kunena is that they add features that Kunena really needs to make it a full blown, feature rich discussion board. These features include private messaging (though still not tightly integrated as it should be), extended profiles (also not tightly integrated and actually a bit confusing for users), invite features, event announcements, calendar abilities, user blogging abilities, photo galleries, basic social networking, improved user and group management/permissions, etc.

To be honest, the integration aspect IS the problem. Different projects with different developers... with different opinions/visions on how things should be structured/accomplished causes problems. Integration will likely never be as good as it really NEEDS to be because of this.

In my opinion, Kunena would be best served by developing its own community/social mod. In this way, focus could be placed on tight integration with the forum, but the two mods could be developed separately of one another otherwise, and the Kunena forum package could operate with or without the community/social mod, allowing for a smaller package for those who just need basic forum capabilities, without all the community/social stuff.

I really do love Kunena. It's a great project. The downside is that, in many instances, you need to use CB or JomSocial just to get some features that Kunena is lacking that other discussion board software already has built in or has available as tightly integrated addons. Relying on CB or JomSocial for these aspects is a mistake in my opinion. They are designed as standalone products, with integration with Kunena being an afterthought and low ranking priority. Kunena can do it better themselves. I firmly believe that.

kellenw wrote: In my opinion, Kunena would be best served by developing its own community/social mod.

I agree and, behind the scenes, this is something we have been considering for a very long time. However, these things require time and money. The latter, i.e. money, is not something that we have an unlimited supply of. We welcome donations (or sponsorship for this particular feature) from anyone who is interested in seeing this idea realised.

Why not make the social/community mod a commercial release?

The main reason why we haven't done all the features by ourself is that they take both time and money as sozzled said.

It doesn't help if we're going to sell these features as the initial investment to make that to happen is something like 100 000€ and 18 months of working time (split to more than one coder). Nobody has this kind of money and nobody has the time to do it for free -- we all need to pay our living.

Another point of view is that do we want to make the best forum or do we like to make weaker forum with more social features. The road we are going to take is probably in somewhere between and some of that stuff isn't going to be free. But before we can make any of that, we need to get Kunena 2.0 out.

I like the fact that Kunena is dedicated to a forum and forum only comp. I have seen other Joomla forum projects that have tried to go the social route and they self imploded. IMHO I would say stick with what makes K so great!

We do need some basic social features in the future, but you're right: If we'd try to do everything at once, we would need much more resources even to support the product itself.

additional modules or plugins in Kunena will be great, for example : in a photo forum, members like to have their own mini gallery with a link visit my gallery

is there any big new version of Kunena for Joomla 2.5 ? I have to migrate a phpbb forum to Kunena but I prefer to wait if necessary

thanks to the team