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 - 11 years 9 months ago #11 by sozzled

Balázs wrote: Why can't I write topics into the top level categories (sections)?

Because that's not how Kunena works - and has never worked like that - that's why!

Balázs wrote: Secondly, why use an xxx_kunena_categories table, if you could just use Joomla's table?

Because that's not how things work in the real world, that's why. the xxx_categories table is for other Joomla categories or articles; the xxx_kunena_categories table is for other [Kunena] forum categories or forum topics.

You are more than welcome to join the Kunena development team and lend your expertise in redesigning Kunena if you would like. :)
Last edit: 11 years 9 months ago by sozzled.

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11 years 9 months ago #12 by Balázs
As I see, there is enogh developer in the Kunena team, so it's enough to give them good advices about where to develop.
What I suggested in another topic was improved moderation tools (copy posts, topics and cut posts, topics) , or what we talkt about, that you can write topics in the top level categories (sections).

But whats important is:
In Joomla 2.5, the category manager is not just for core Joomla articles and content anymore. You can use the category manager to create categories for your component, and Joomla allows to display categories only from one specific extension.
Also, Joomla 2.5 has implemented Update manager, RSS, Captcha, and many other things, and all of these can be used by extensions. You don't need to write your own RSS manager, because Joomla takes care of it.
In fact, Joomla also have the option of Profile plugins, so you can extend the basic User profile of Joomla. Meaning, that you also don't have to write your own user manager for your extension.

I think an extension being "modern" means, that it uses what it can from the features of the core system. That's what Kunena should consider, and that's where it should develop.

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11 years 9 months ago #13 by Matias
Kunena never had sections like Joomla did. The only reason why to have sections is visual as having them allows us to have better structure in index page. I've been looking ways to get rid of sections, but they ended to be so useful that you can now have sections everywhere in your category tree. The only limitation is that categories without parents are always sections -- just because of our current index layout gets too confusing to users to understand if we allow posts to be written in root level.

If you can design index layout which keeps the current visual separation between sections but is easy to understand for the users, I'm more than interested to implement that. Removing section restriction is easy: I just remove one if and it's gone. But until someone starts thinking a way to display index page like that, I consider this discussion ended.

We aren't currently using Joomla categories as they are too restricted to our use and we would loose a few features if we used it. Having Joomla! 1.5 support makes it even worse: we would need to write our own category manager anyway, as the old version of Joomla doesn't really support categories. There's a promise of unified content model in Joomla 4.0, but until that there's no way technical to create a forum that works like you would like to.

If you ask why we are still supporting Joomla! 1.5, the answer is that Kunena 2.0 was largely developed on Joomla! 1.5 because of there wasn't even Joomla! 1.6 when we started and both Kunena and Joomla had bugs that prevented Kunena to be stable as late as J! 1.6.5. Kunena 2.0 has been in development for almost 3 years now in which time Joomla has changed a lot. And it will change even more to 3.0 and 4.0, which basically means that we are always going to be somewhat late as we have to support also the current version.

The trend in large components has been to use less and less of Joomla! framework. Think of JomSocial, CB, DocMan or any of the large components -- they have all written their own framework or using something else like Zend framework. Even Akeeba has its own layer between Joomla and their own code. This is because of when Joomla! 1.6 was released, it was just too hard to get your component to run in it.

We took a different path, but Joomla is changing too fast to keep up. We just don't have enough resources to keep up like we want to. It's easy to convert a small component to use the latest code, but if you have a large component, you need to be sure that you have the latest version available for your current users, migration is 1-click operation, your product is stable, it doesn't change existing sites too much on upgrades and so on. All of which takes a lot of time.

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11 years 9 months ago - 11 years 9 months ago #14 by Balázs
Because we’re talking about future development here, I think we should look only forward. Joomla 2.5 goes to a very good way, so in my opinion you should consider the features of the new version, because if there will be an even more positive change (Joomla 4.0 – 2014 Q1), it will be easier to follow that change, than when you leave everything in its current state.

We were talking about Joomla 1.5 didn’t have these features, like unified category manager, user manager, etc. – it’s not necessary to think about a version which is not even supported since April, but if I remember well, even you won’t support it in Kunena 3.0, so you will have new opportunities with these things.

On the other hand, you said that other components also use their own managers like these, but if this is a Joomla extension, then why not use Joomla’s features? The very philosophy of Joomla MVC is the unified structure, but if you don’t want to depend on it so much, then you shouldn’t even write it to MVC, but write a completely independent forum engine instead.

The extensions you talked about are also the worst example, they are completely out of the line.

I don’t agree with the philosophy, that if you were present in the time of Mamboo, you should not follow the changes of Joomla. This is a typical “don’t see forward” behavior.

For the topics in top-level category (section) I have 2 ideas:

1. In case of full route path – what I have recommended in the Switchable SEF option (to show full real path) topic , you should see clearly through the categories.

2. In a given main category (section), you should show the subcategories, and under it, the topics in the main category, and then the active topics under that.

As my final words, I think in this topic I only repeat myself. If the developers of Kunena don’t have an open view for new things, then I think it’s really useless to talk about throwing out the old thing, what could be done better with the new fatures of Joomla API.

And one last thing: if Kunena ever wants to grow up at least to PHPBB, than at least don’t make things harder for the users who just simply want to moderate their forums, but they can’t because the basic moderator functions are missing. I also talked about this in Improved moderation tools (copy posts, topics and cut posts, topics) . Maybe this should be the first priority, and then the other things…
Last edit: 11 years 9 months ago by Balázs.

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11 years 9 months ago #15 by Matias
Didn't you hear that Joomla 1.5 is still supported and will be for a few months? As I suspected they had to do that because of migration from Joomla! 1.5 to 2.5 was and still is too hard for most users. There's now initiative to get migration component inside Joomla 1.5/2.5 itself, which probably help a bit... So most of the components still have to support users on Joomla! 1.5, even if we don't want to do that.

Having said that, yes, we are going to get rid of Joomla 1.5 support, but before that we need to get our new template and a few features done. J! 1.5 support blocks Kunena from working in J!3.0, which we need to support pretty soon after it gets out.

Why not to use Joomla's features? The answer is that everything you see now was developed in the past. Normally one release cycle for a large project takes something between 8 and 18 months of time. And the architectural changes should always be done in the beginning of the cycle, so that the product gets more stable long before the release. If you fail to do that, you end up having project which releases 2 years late or it becomes very unstable. I can name a few of those projects..

I actually understand those other components: instead of using half a year of fixing undocumented compatibility issues and falling into despair, they used the same time to protect themselves against changes in Joomla. Even companies creating Joomla sites do the same -- they don't use Joomla Framework anymore! Year ago it seemed a very good idea to stop using Joomla Framework because of it was just too expensive to use it. I'm happy to say that things have changed after that, but the change is still too fast to keep up. The features that are now being developed in Joomla are too unstable to be developed on and those that are available today take a year to get into large components.

1. There are two issues with category routing. The first is Google, which ignores too long paths in its search results. I think it uses only the first 4: /forum/category1/category2/topic and everything after that gets ignored. Please correct me if I'm wrong! Second issue is how to reliably create those URLs. I've already figured it out, but it still takes some time to implement and test it in a way that doesn't break anything.

2. I cannot see how it's different to what we have now. When I tried this feature, the issue was that nobody clicked on the main category and people were complaining.

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