Question Kunena 1.6 - a moderator's view

thanks for the update ron

Where is the ALPAHA!

Sorry excited here, just had to say it, im on the edge of my seat, no joke.


Anyway, just out of curiosity, will Kunena 1.6 eventually be able to run on Joomla 1.6. From reading up and particpating in some of the developer conversations, I have notice a small consensus on the amount of work required to make Joomla 1.5 Extensions compatiable to Joomla 1.6 Architecture. Is there a plan to have Kuenea 1.6 available for Joomla 1.6? Or are we specifically planning to wait until Kuenea 2.0 to shift towards Joomla 1.6.

Out of curiosity

K 1.6 alpha will be available soon - that's the only estimate of time that I have and I'm merely passing on that same message to others.

This is a big job. It needs the coordinated efforts of several people working together to bring make things happen. I am sure that people would prefer that the public availability of K 1.6 alpha was properly managed rather than thrown together like a dog's breakfast!

The main problems facing this community, after the release of K 1.6, will be how to manage the flood of questions that will pour into these forums! This is why I have spent the past 2½ months writing this "'blog" of mine, to prepare people, to anticipate their questions, and to make sure that we don't repeat the mistakes that were made when K 1.5.0a was released.

The consistent message that we're giving is this:

K 1.6 alpha is a test version. Even though it's still in the latter stages of its design, it does work and the developers are eager to implement this on their own sites or for clients who have funded this research and development. So, you can see, it's important that we get it right. It's vital that we obtain the support of this community to test K 1.6 alpha and to provide

constructive feedback to the development team on aspects of its design and construction.K 1.6 alpha is not being made available merely so that people can inquisitively snoop around to see if it meets their needs or not. It is not being made available for people to deploy it on their live production sites - indeed, that would be a costly mistake.

We expect a lot of questions about K 1.6: we will answer those that we can but there are many that we will not be able to answer:

• "I have just installed K 1.6 and I can't make it work". K 1.6 will require some technical experience; it is not for the average user. There will be release notes and an installation guide. That's about the extent of the support offered with installation problems.
• "I have just upgraded my K 1.5.11 production site to K 1.6 and I can't make it work." How many times do we have to say this? K 1.6 alpha is not recommended for production websites! If you upgrade you are responsible for sorting out any problems yourself.
• "How can I change K 1.6 to ..." Forget it! At this stage, while K 1.6 is still in design, it is not appropriate to entertain questions about customising it and it will only confuse matters for other users and the developers. By all means, please post your suggestions on how to improve K 1.6 - we want to hear them - but don't expect any kind of response to questions on how to change a product whose design has not yet stabilised.
• "How does xxxxxxxx feature work in K 1.6?" While the design is still fluid (and we're still testing ourselves) we may not know the answers. If you don't know how something works, please browse this discussion topic - maybe the answer lies there, buried amongst the stuff I've written? - or search the forum. If people have an interest in sharing their discoveries about how things work in K 1.6, we'd love to hear that too!

I would rather not commit myself to stating whether K 1.6 will be J! 1.6 compatible or J1.6 "ready" but I would guess that the conversion to make it compatible should work without any hurdles to overcome. That's just a guess. Remember, J! 1.6 stable doesn't exist yet so it's a bit hard to make iron-clad promises, isn't it?

Sounds good sozzled, I love being able to tinker around with stuff, especially when they are buggy

K 1.6 alpha looks cleaner in design and all the bells and whistles. It will be great to get a peak into the coding structure.

I am thinking there will be a dedicated section to reporting bug reports with our current configuration, and I am guessing we wil be providing our configuration details that Kunena generates? Is there a format to how bugs will be reported, and in the manner they should be reported.

One thing that drives me crazy is not having a public place to report bugs. I have been with some communities that only use contact forms to report bug. I believe it not only wastes time on our end when we repeat the same bugs, but also the developers time. You did mention something earlier, but did not seem to sure on the idea.

coder4life: you are 100% on the money, mate! One of the hold-ups to the release of K 1.6 is the lack of a category to report K 1.6 "issues" and this needs to be put in place first. I also agree with you that it is highly desirable if "bug reports" are presented in a consistent style or format. Indeed, that should also be the case when users request support assistance for K 1.5 but, sadly, people continue to ignore the guidelines that we have already established.

I did mention earlier that there is a new feature in K 1.6 that will allow users to report their configuration details. However this new feature also requires K 1.6 to be deployed on this website and that hasn't occurred yet, either.

We had plans to release Alpha already to the general public, but unfortunately that hasn't happened yet -- mostly because we haven't been able to get enough (core) team members to be available to push all the changes (in Kunena.com, not in K1.6Alpha) that we believe are required to get K1.6 into this site.

Personal life (family) and work comes first as we do not want our team members to burn themselves out of this project. But fortunately delays in Alpha release gives us opportunity to test it better and fix many bugs before the release. As number of known issues goes down, we get closer to Beta stage, where more weight is in finishing our new template.

If you are ready to commit some time to our project -- reporting/fixing small bugs -- you are welcome to join our test team. Just PM me and you get access to our (almost) daily builds.

PS. Kunena is already running in J1.6, but it still has some issues to be solved. J1.6 trunk has been a moving target lately, so I'm waiting it to stabilize a bit (beta) before continuing with J1.6 compatibility.