Question Kunena 1.6 - a moderator's view

See Kunena 1.6 - A dingo took my login ... ?

??? This feature is missing

rinuccio sp: please don't misuse this discussion topic to complain about defects in your testing of K 1.6. That's what we have a dedicated category for: Kunena 1.6 test reports . The feature that I described (in message #40091 )was not missing in the version that I tested.

hmm, ok Sorry :blush:

SPAM removed

It's been over a fortnight since I last wrote something in this topic. Like most others here, I've been fully occupied with many interests and I haven't updated this topic with further news/views about K 1.6. Sorry about that.

As users will know, K 1.6.0a has been publicly available for testing/familiarisation for a couple of weeks. At this time, the version that was released (Build 2587) is now considered "out of date" since many improvements have been made to it. Although the latest alpha version of K 1.6 still needs a couple of minor changes to make it suitable for users to play with, we have moved a long way past the feature set that was incorporated in the first version available for public download. A new "alpha 2" version will be available (shortly, I expect) for users to trial. As we've continually stated in the past, users should always remember that alpha versions are not fully feature-functional, the design is subject to change, and test versions should not be used on live production websites.

Even though the developers feel comfortable with the stability of K 1.6.0a, Kunena 1.6 is still not at the stage where it is a supported product.

We still encourage users to download the current "alpha 1" version at the present time, if they have not already done so, but they may want to consider holding off reporting problems with that version until the "alpha 2" version is made public. We'll let you know when this happens.

I will try to write more, next time, about the improvements brought with K 1.6.0a2: new template manager/installer, thank you, user moderation features, etc.

K 1.6 will be released soon and, when I write this, I mean that a "stable" version of K 1.6 will be made publicly available that will include a [mostly] complete feature set. At that time, all this discussion about alpha/beta/release candidate versions will stop and we can all breathe a lot easier.

We cannot say for certain when this will happen or what conditions need to be firmly established before we can make such bold claims as these, but we're talking in terms of only a few weeks, not a few months. If people would like to know more about K 1.6 news, they can participate in the Kunena Fan Club at the Joomla People site, follow the news on Twitter , or get involved in downloading K 1.6 and familiarising themselves with it.

As each day passes, the confidence level of the development team continues to rise - this is a very good sign - but there's still a massive amount of work to do.

K 1.6 changes the way that people uses Kunena. I've been saying this ever since I started this 'blog 4½ months ago and I will continue to write it. But, no matter how many times I write it, when K 1.6 is eventually released as a stable version its changed behaviour will surprise, startle and (possibly) annoy people. K 1.6 is different, that's all it really is, and that's why it's important to introduce the differences gradually rather than suddenly "ambush" people with the changes all at once.

We need your help now. For various reasons (most of them have to do with the fact that we have our own lives) we cannot complete all the necessary preparations ourselves. A big area that needs help is with our user documentation and tutorials that explain, to new users (and to a few of us older users, too ) how to use Kunena 1.6. You don't have to be a great word-smith, but if you can help then, please, don't wait for us to send you a special invitation! Just do it and try your best and we'll do our best to encourage and support you. If you have any private worries or questions about this then, please drop me a line (PM me) and I'll see how I can help.

Sorry, didn't have time for more screenshots or updates about K 1.6. I'm still fairly busy now that K 1.5.12 has been released .