Question There should be no sections, as there aren't any in Joomla

There shouldn't be any sections, only categories with unlimited depth.
Now if there is a category in a section, then you cannot start a topic in the section itself, which is very uncomfortable.
For example: I have a section about editors and there are categories in it like jck, jce, tiny, etc.
If someone want's to talk about editors in general, he can't create a topic about it, so I need to create another category about editors in general.

While it's true to say that Joomla 1.5 had sections and categories (these existed in different database tables: jos_categories, jos_sections) and Jooml 2.5 only has categories (xxx_categories), it's unfair to compare how Joomla implemented the concept of unlimited depth categories with Kunena.

From a truly technical perspective, Kunena only has categories. From an operational point of view, "level-0" categories operate in a slightly different way from "level-1" categories which operate slightly differently from "level-2" categories and so on. In order to differentiate these different operational aspects, we use the terms sections, categories and sub-categories. But, from a literal point, they're all categories.

The operational differences are discussed in Sections, Categories, sub-Categories (Part 1)

If you have a better way of describing the categories in Kunena, we'd love to hear from you.

I know how categories are in Kunena, this is why I recommended in the Feature Requests topic that you change the current structure to unlimited depth categories like in Joomla 2.5

Now I have to create a Main section, which is completely unnecessary, and I have to create a Forums category in it.
In the Forums category I create a Kunena category and a 1.7 and a 2.0 subcategory in that. In this case the two subcategories (1.7 and 2.0) which are important to me, won't show up in the route, but that's exactly what I would need.
If there weren't the Main section, then the route would be one step shorter and the subcategory would show up in it.

In my current forums there is a Forums section and there are Kunene, Agora, etc. categories in it. In the categories there are 1.7.x, 2.5.x (Joomla versions) subcategories.
Now if someone want's to talk about a general topic in general, he doesn't have a place to post because he can't post into the Forums section, so I had to create a general category.
Which is not a very pretty solution if you think about it.

This is why I recommend to switch from the unnecessary section-category style to simply categories with unlimited depth.

We have discussed this internally many times among our Dev Team members. Here is the result of that discussion.

What if we introduce another category on the "top-level". Do we display both categories topic lists? How its implemented now you navigate to a category in a "section" or a category inside "another category / sub-category". Only "one category" is displayed with its "associated topic-list". If you were allowed to have "two categories" on a navigation we would have to display the "associated information for both categories", which is "both topic-lists". Navigation for multiple categories and topics becomes complex.

As sozzled pointed out however is that Kunena from a technical perspective only contains categories. However for a view perspective the top level categories need to be treated differently because they are meant to organize your content (hence sections) rather display information about the content (categories and topic-lists). Most forum software (vBulletin, phpBB, SimpleMachines) treat the top-level the same way. The sections indicator is meant for users to understand that this is not an ordinary category, but a category with limitations.

These circumstances are most prominent on the index page.

NOTE: Provided quotes so its easier to read because repeated terms.

I can see the "route" to sub-categories just fine:




Also, my arrangement works very well. Someone who wants to post a general Camera topic can do so under "The Camera", and more specific topics can go under one of the sub-categories.

How would making level-0 categories (what you call sections) different change any of this?

As an alternative, I could have one single section called "My Awesome Forum", which is made up of all the categories and sub-categories. Voila, problem solved.

coder4life!

I'll try to start again. Fortunately, Joomla has dropped the section-category structure and there are only categories and unlimited numbers of subcategories. This gives us the question: Why does Kunena need sections? Because other forums use it? So now we are to copy their things or we want to implement new things innovatively?

We should talk here about how Kunena could be better than the others or how it could stand out from the other forum engines.

For example with this. It doesn't matter at all what we call it, section or main category, there is no real good explanation of why it is closed.

UPDATE: If you need even more innovation, then I think Kunena should use Joomla's default category manager, and for user profiles, it should also use Joomla's user and manager.

UPDATE2: If Kunena was completely rewritten to MVC structure, then maybe it would have been logical to think about making my extension compatible with every Joomla 2.5 feature.
For example: Category management, user management, third-party extension compatibility.
If I'm about to completely rewrite one of my older component, then I won't just change 1 or 2 things, but I drop everything what's old and I try to follow new Joomla features 100%.