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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.