Loved Kunena 2.0 - a moderator's view

Hello Grubbe,

I am the lead designer/coordinator on the new template Mirage. Thank you for your feedback on the new template, I greatly appreciate your effort. As a few words of caution, Mirage is in a state of development so any images you may see may be incorrect. Many of your analyses are very important in user interference design. I have talked internally with many members of our team about some of the issues/concerns you brought up about the template before you created this post. I am very concerned about the requirements, perceptions, and customizations needed for forum software. Yes you are right I might disagree with what you outlined, however do not feel I am not taking the things you brought up into consideration. Your feedback is very important to us.

To address your points, I like to make responses to your listed items. As a disclaimer, any features I mention may or may not be completed. They are simply there to expresses my desire for the design of the template. Also it is important to consider that many site administrators may have different preferences according to the scope of the design needs of their project.


1) The template Topics/Replies and Reviews/Views was a big issue we talked about internally with our team. We were set on only using the list header only to convey the definition of the column, however I decided to bring this to someone with no experience with Kunena to be sure. The person brought up the point that if the listing of the categories/topics was very long and the list header was not in the current view window of the browser, the user might loose some information about what the numbers meant without scrolling back to the top to find the list header. An extra event of scrolling to the list header at the top and back to their last location is created. The other columns do not have this problem because some information is implied with the content. Sometimes people scroll really fast to find some general information on a webpage and might end up in this situation with the list header is not in view upon the scroll. The situation is more of a problem when a user is very new the forum. It was decided to include both with the intention of allowing the header to provide some eventual sorting, while preserving the integrity of what the numbers meant inside the column.

2) Yes we have the same concern. The Avatar does add some artistic value for users, but generally some site administrators do not need it. I plan to have this configurable.

3) I believe this is more of a site administrator preference. We actually do use the spacing/framing whitespace in Mirage to convey some information about what category the user is in by inheriting the color from the category list background. However, I felt some site administrators would want to take full advantage of the space. As a result Mirage is designed to include spacing control, which is usually absent in template configurations. Our template heavily reuses around 10 spacing CSS classes that generally applies to the entire site. Mirage is fit together like a puzzle. As a result spacing/framing will be made configurable allowing to theme many of the general spacing elements that occur throughout Kunena. You will be able to eliminate many of these framing concerns you brought up.

4) Good point. I agree that a more general location to access that information should exist in the menu.

5) As Sozzled mentioned, we agree and is configurable.

6) We had some similar concern and decided this would be site administrator preference. Our reasoning, on long discussion boards its difficult to scroll and remember information about what categories would need to perform the action. We also plan to add more buttons in the future. However I agree on shorter discussion boards this extra button-bar does not make sense. As a result I will consider to make the button-bar to be disabled in configuration options and include a global header option, which was planed in some form anyway. The intention of the buttons where they are now is to make clear to the user what block/portion of the discussion board he or she is able to affect on a case by case basis. The result is the ability to have more immediate active actions.

7) We are missing some filtering control have not decided how to include this in the design. This will alter where buttons and pagination are positioned and styled.

The Last Post text is a link to the last post of the topic. I agree this portion could be considered for an adjustment.

9) Pagination length is configurable, and is why we include it in a single line. The pagination buttons are too big and need to be adjusted.

10) I believe this is more of a site administrator preference. Some site administrators have difference preference about how dates should be displayed based on country customs.

11) Please see number 3 about framing.

12) As Sozzled mentioned, it is a signature. The section needs to be styled.


I hope this gives you a bit more insight about these issues and concerns. We share many of the same. Feel free to ask some questions. Again things are subject to change. For everyone this is a good opportunity to make feedback about what is available, not what could be available.

Hi sozzle and coder4life

Thanks for your answers and your involvement in my suggestions. It is greatly appreciated.

@sozzle
That's really an annoying signature you have I'm glad it's just you and not a part of the template! I did however made me click the Thank You button.

@coder4life
It seems that we share many of the same thoughts. I get you points and I agree that it's difficult to please all users as they have different opinions and needs. Bottom line must be that as many things as possible should be configurable. And I can see that you already planned that a part of the way, so that's good..

Once again thank you guys!

For general information.

In the (less than) two weeks since K 2.0.0 was released, K 2.0.0 has been downloaded 10447 times.

Since K 2.0.1 was released (around 12 hours ago), K 2.0.1 has been downloaded 972 times.

Thank you everyone.