Question Honest opinion please

I a building a new site on Joomla 2.5.

I have previously used SMF and phpBB3 bridges but prefer a forum that is fully integrated.

Two questions for now:

1. Does Kuena work with Joomla 2.5?

2. Is Kunena totally seamless in that it the forums blend in with the Joomla template without the ned for additional templates or graphics modifications?

thanks.

1. Kunena 1.7.2 does (out soon) and 1.7.1 does on some setups but 1.7.2. is really close (this website is Joomla 2.5 running Kunena 1.7.2).

2. You don't need a bridge for user intergration as you do with phpbb. The default template (the one on this website) has a Blend option that picks up the colours from the surrounding joomla template and does a pretty good job of matching it up.

G'day, apc, and thank you for your very interesting and important question. I will try to give you my honest opinion and give you unbiased feedback.

There are a lot of good web-based forum solutions available. People are attracted to Kunena for many reasons:

(1) Kunena is a native extension for Joomla. It is one of the few - if not the only - forums that works on all supported versions of Joomla (J! 1.5.25, J! 1.7.4 and J! 2.5) without the need to install "bridging software."

(2) Kunena has an active community and an active development team which means that improvements will continue to be made. Kunena is expected to have a long future ahead of it and therefore an investment in Kunena is a way of protecting the investment you have made in building your site and developing the community based around it.

(3) Kunena is open source software which means that you are able to extend and develop it to suit your own purposes.

(4) Kunena is free.

To help people make informed decisions about whether Kunena is the best forum product for their needs, there is a list of features that will help you to compare different versions of Kunena - what each offers and what you may expect - here: Kunena Features .

There are a few problems with J! 2.5.0. A new version (J! 2.5.1) was expected to be announced yesterday but this has not yet happened. Some changes were needed to K 1.7.1 so that Kunena could be classed as "J! 2.5-compatible"; even with the expected changes in J 2.5.1 (changes that affect hundreds of other Joomla extensions that cause problems with J! 2.5.0) we will still recommend that people should use K 1.7.2 in future.

K 1.7.2 will also introduce a few differences from earlier versions. Most of these differences will not be visible to most people who have used Kunena in the past but we are introducing a couple of changes now so as to prepare people for what will come in future (in K 2.0). When K 1.7.2 is released, we will continue to urge everyone who has used Kunena before to upgrade to this later version. The reason for this is that K 1.7.2 is expected to be the final release of the K 1.7 series; there are not expected to be any further versions released in K 1.7. This is not to say that people who continue to use older versions of Kunena will not be able to upgrade to K 2.0 without going through K 1.7.2 first. I am only trying to say that K 1.7.2 will give people the best chance to insure (as well as to ensure) that upgrading in future will be relatively trouble-free.

I can say, in all honesty, that there are many other forum products available that people can choose. Some of those offer features that are not currently in Kunena and some of those other forum products will, in specific instances, offer features that are better than Kunena. No forum product is perfect and everyone should decide for themselves what is the best for their needs.

Having said that, in my personal opinion, people choose Kunena because it works. Kunena has a sizeable range of features; Kunena is an active project. Kunena was designed for Joomla and will continue to develop as Joomla continues to develop. Kunena is low-cost. And lastly, there is this wonderful community that is keen to see Kunena continue to thrive and improve.

sozzled wrote: G'day, apc, and thank you for your very interesting and important question. I will try to give you my honest opinion and give you unbiased feedback.

There are a lot of good web-based forum solutions available. People are attracted to Kunena for many reasons:

(1) Kunena is a native extension for Joomla. It is one of the few - if not the only - forums that works on all supported versions of Joomla (J! 1.5.25, J! 1.7.4 and J! 2.5) without the need to install "bridging software."

(2) Kunena has an active community and an active development team which means that improvements will continue to be made. Kunena is expected to have a long future ahead of it and therefore an investment in Kunena is a way of protecting the investment you have made in building your site and developing the community based around it.

(3) Kunena is open source software which means that you are able to extend and develop it to suit your own purposes.

(4) Kunena is free.

To help people make informed decisions about whether Kunena is the best forum product for their needs, there is a list of features that will help you to compare different versions of Kunena - what each offers and what you may expect - here: Kunena Features .

There are a few problems with J! 2.5.0. A new version (J! 2.5.1) was expected to be announced yesterday but this has not yet happened. Some changes were needed to K 1.7.1 so that Kunena could be classed as "J! 2.5-compatible"; even with the expected changes in J 2.5.1 (changes that affect hundreds of other Joomla extensions that cause problems with J! 2.5.0) we will still recommend that people should use K 1.7.2 in future.

K 1.7.2 will also introduce a few differences from earlier versions. Most of these differences will not be visible to most people who have used Kunena in the past but we are introducing a couple of changes now so as to prepare people for what will come in future (in K 2.0). When K 1.7.2 is released, we will continue to urge everyone who has used Kunena before to upgrade to this later version. The reason for this is that K 1.7.2 is expected to be the final release of the K 1.7 series; there are not expected to be any further versions released in K 1.7. This is not to say that people who continue to use older versions of Kunena will not be able to upgrade to K 2.0 without going through K 1.7.2 first. I am only trying to say that K 1.7.2 will give people the best chance to insure (as well as to ensure) that upgrading in future will be relatively trouble-free.

I can say, in all honesty, that there are many other forum products available that people can choose. Some of those offer features that are not currently in Kunena and some of those other forum products will, in specific instances, offer features that are better than Kunena. No forum product is perfect and everyone should decide for themselves what is the best for their needs.

Having said that, in my personal opinion, people choose Kunena because it works. Kunena has a sizeable range of features; Kunena is an active project. Kunena was designed for Joomla and will continue to develop as Joomla continues to develop. Kunena is low-cost. And lastly, there is this wonderful community that is keen to see Kunena continue to thrive and improve.

Thank you very much for your detailed reply.

I think the 2.5 compatibility is not an issue from what you said, and the reason I asked here because Kunena would be my first choice for a native Joomla forum solution.

The other crucial factor is style compatibility which is very important to this particular site.

Bridged solutions with, e.g. phpBB3 obviously are obviously independant of the authentication, and therefore provide the opportunity to ensure the forums match the main site.

I would appreciate your comments on this aspect of kunena.

K 1.7.2 has been released. See forum announcements made today. See also JED entry >>> here <<<

What comes to style compatibility, it's one of the places where I must say that we are still lacking back in Kunena 1.7. Actually having better template is one of the main reasons why Kunena 2.0 is still not out - we really want to bring templating into new level, while still allowing some level of backwards compatibility to the current users (Blue Eagle compatible CSS can be imported to K2.0 and used, thus giving many administrators possibility to upgrade first and to look at the new templates later when they have more time).