Kunena 6.2.5 & module Kunena Latest 6.0.7 released

The Kunena team has announce the arrival of Kunena 6.2.5 [K 6.2.5] which is now available for download as a native Joomla extension for J! 4.3.x/4.4.x/5.0.x. This version addresses most of the issues that were discovered in K 6.1 / K 6.2 and issues discovered during the last development stages of K 6.2

Topics contains old discussions (generally more than one year ago or based on circumstances that subsequently changed) or topics resolved in other ways. Topics moved into this category are closed from further discussion.

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

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11 years 9 months ago #1 by Balázs
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.

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11 years 9 months ago - 11 years 9 months ago #2 by sozzled
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.
Last edit: 11 years 9 months ago by sozzled.

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11 years 9 months ago #3 by Balázs
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.

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11 years 9 months ago - 11 years 9 months ago #4 by coder4life
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.
Last edit: 11 years 9 months ago by coder4life.

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11 years 9 months ago - 11 years 9 months ago #5 by GoremanX
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.

THE place to discuss photography!
www.friendlyphotozone.com
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Last edit: 11 years 9 months ago by GoremanX.

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11 years 9 months ago #6 by Balázs
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%.

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11 years 9 months ago - 11 years 9 months ago #7 by coder4life
Because I told you, the section is just a name to state of a status of a category. A section is a category without a topic list. Its not fair to compare Joomla to Kunena and how they are dealing with categories because we have different requirements about "when" to handle how information is displayed.

To say we copy things is largely a big assumption and just false. Kunena develops by Joomla, for Joomla.
Last edit: 11 years 9 months ago by coder4life.

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11 years 9 months ago - 11 years 9 months ago #8 by sozzled
I think we're talking about two separate things.

Firstly, from a purely technical, literal perspective there is only one table in Kunena that deals with "categories" and these are managed, in the one place, with the Kunena Category Manager. There is only the xxx_kunena_categories table. In J! 1.5.x there is a xxx_categories table and there is a xxx_sections table; there were also separate tools for managing Joomla sections and Joomla categories. In J! 2.5 there is only the xxx_categories table and this is managed on one place in the J! 2.5 category manager tool. From a purely architectural point of view there is only one table in Kunena that handles categories and that is the xxx_kunena_categories table; this table, in effect, allows unlimited "nesting" of categories within categories.

The terminology for Kunena (regarding "sections", "categories" and sub-categories") is different to the terminology used in Joomla and, I think, that's where the confusion arises.

sozzled wrote:

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

If you have a better way to describe the differences between how Kunena categories work in the forum, then we really would love to hear your ideas. Until we think of something different this is what people need to understand:

Kunena sections = records in the table xxx_kunena_categories that have no parent.
Kunena categories = records in the table xxx_kunena_categories that have a "section" as a parent.
Kunena sub-categories = records in the table xxx_kunena_categories that have "category" as a parent.

See also, for background discussion, Standard (consistent) Terminology?! . After we had that discussion, we changed the terms (as I talked about them there). So now we seem to be going around in ever-widening circles.
Last edit: 11 years 9 months ago by sozzled.

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11 years 9 months ago #9 by Balázs
coder4life!

Because Kunena is an extension, I think it should follow the features of Joomla first, not other forum systems.

Sozzled!

This is absolutely clear, but my question still wasn't answered:
Why can't I write topics into the top level categories (sections)?

Secondly, why use an xxx_kunena_categories table, if you could just use Joomla's table?
What's more, if yout used that, you could put topics into the top level, and even create content uncategorized.

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11 years 9 months ago #10 by Balázs
The big question is, why does Kunena have a separate category manager, user manager, plugin manager, update manager, etc.?
Joomla has its own API to do these things, we just need to use it.
Not to mention how much smaller the code would be.

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