Question Kunena 1.6 - a moderator's view

I'd like to know when we will have a chance to play and experiment with the demo K1.6 discussion forum. Any projections on this?

Sincerely,
Howard

G'day, Howard. I haven't discussed with the developers their plans nor current progress on the K 1.6 build. Construction of K 1.6 is not finished at the moment. In other words, there is not even a complete alpha test version available for internal testing. Completion could be imminent or it could be days or weeks away; I don't know because I haven't asked them.

After the alpha test has been made available to the internal testing team, and after faults have been identified and corrected, a beta test will be released to a wider audience. I would guess that it will be the beta version that will be offered for demonstration purposes (although I could be mistaken). Neither the alpha nor beta releases will be supported in any way.

After the beta version has been cleared of problems, a public release will be forthcoming.

I cannot be 100% sure but, on past performance, beta test versions of Kunena have normally circulated for about 2-3 weeks before they become stable. However, because K 1.6 is a major rewrite and represents, in some respects, a paradigm shift from K 1.5, the period for beta testing may need to be extended.

Everything that I have just written is speculative but is meant to be interpreted as a moderate, balanced response to your question.

I'm sure I am not the only one who is extremely excited about this new up-and-coming release. Every day I come on here hoping to see those magic words telling us that a new version is available.

I feel a little bit like when I was 14, a few weeks before Christmas :laugh:

Hi Sozzled, thanks for your detailed response. I too am very excited about the upcoming K1.6 and of course I want the development team to do their best job and take their time so the result is optimum. I look forward to hearing the progress reports.

Sincerely,
Howard

Earlier today we were asked a question about Internet Explorer 6 and Kunena. My reply, in part, was this:

Have a read of this news article: www.betanews.com/joewilcox/article/Let-t...tch-begin/1267468004 . Even Google is abandoning support for IE6 ... and if the big guys like Google can't fix all those IE6 problems how do you expect people like us to handle them?

I have some news about K 1.6 that may delight some people but it may also disappoint some others. From K 1.6 there will be no built-in provision for Internet Explorer 6 compatibility. In other words, if you (or your users) have IE6 and you use K 1.6 then you will have to make your own arrangements to make it work for you.

It is quite difficult (some might say impossible) to test for every web browser that has ever been released. I think that it's reasonable to say that the main browsers will be catered for, namely Mozilla Firefox 3.5, IE 8 (and, to a lesser extent, IE7) and Google Chrome simply because, between them, they have 83.8% of the market share ( source ). There will be compatibility issues for other browsers but one hopes they won't be too significant.

So the developers have made few forum posts or twitter updates which is a good sign. It's great to see the moderators stepping up their forum responses to give the developers time to work on the actual coding.

Looking forward to the results. Getting excited! :woohoo:

Over the past couple of weeks I have observed that, whenever people have been provided with the advice "this problem will be solved in K 1.6" or "this feature will be included in K 1.6", or something similar, users often ask the question "When will K 1.6 be available?" in each of these topics.

We are not going to answer the same question asked in dozens of places. So, please, don't ask the question because you won't receive an answer.

The answer to the question, "When will K 1.6 be available?", will be a public announcement by the development team. The current situation has not changed from what I wrote earlier:

I haven't discussed with the developers their plans nor current progress on the K 1.6 build. Construction of K 1.6 is not finished at the moment. In other words, there is not even a complete alpha test version available for internal testing. Completion could be imminent or it could be days or weeks away; I don't know because I haven't asked them.

After the alpha test has been made available to the internal testing team, and after faults have been identified and corrected, a beta test will be released to a wider audience. I would guess that it will be the beta version that will be offered for demonstration purposes (although I could be mistaken). Neither the alpha nor beta releases will be supported in any way.

After the beta version has been cleared of problems, a public release will be forthcoming.

I cannot be 100% sure but, on past performance, beta test versions of Kunena have normally circulated for about 2-3 weeks before they become stable. However, because K 1.6 is a major rewrite and represents, in some respects, a paradigm shift from K 1.5, the period for beta testing may need to be extended.

I also hasten to add, that this information is an educated guess.

I have been very quiet for last few weeks.

I'm sorry about that I've not been able to participate on forums -- I'm lacking a few extra hours every day to do everything.

For the last month I've been in parents leave, trying to spend as much time with my family as possible -- and still coding K1.6, so that we can release it as soon as possible. Now we are finishing last missing functionality and after that it's mostly fixing bugs and making some smaller improvements.

It's good to hear about your hard-work Matias.

Keep it up, you're working on a really good project that deserves all my respect!

I have been experimenting with the latest development build of K 1.6 and I am very impressed. Although the feature set is not fully complete, it's coming together nicely. But, as I indicated earlier in this discussion, this new version is going to take time for all of us to accustom ourselves to. Some people are going to love some of the new features (the multiple file attachment feature is really good) and some people will discover that some of changes will be difficult to get used to.

One of the new features that I've been looking at is the new user profile feature. Forum moderators will have considerable power, from the front-end, to regulate user behaviour (to ban or delete users and, optionally, remove all user messages from the forum) as the screenshot below indicates:

But, perhaps the best feature that I've discovered with the new version is the login form. You may recall, in an earlier message of mine ( A dingo took my login ) where I wrote:

Some of the most difficult questions to answer have been the login redirection ones arising from the many attempts to integrate Kunena (and Fireboard even before that) with whatever login extension is used where Kunena is installed. Whether you use JomSocial or Community Builder, some other login mechanism, or just the core Joomla login module, these problems have never quite been resolved satisfactorily.

I am excited to inform you that this new login form is magic! The login forum not only logs you in, it keeps you on the forum page. Now isn't that something to be excited about? :woohoo: