Question Kunena 1.6 - a moderator's view

What can I say that already hasn't?

Kunena is developing into a truly amazing Joomla forum! Many people in this community are on pins and needles waiting for 1.6!

::geek excitement::

Geez, thanks from your comments. There are many other new features and improvements that Sozzled has not shared to you. One example is how you edit your profile. Maybe next set of screenshots will reveal it to you..?

There are still some tasks to do to get K1.6 out, but we are quickly getting into a stage where most of the major features have been implemented. There are still a lot of bugs and rough edges, and some of the features still need work, but we have been in alpha stage for few weeks already.

What has happened to the alpha builds, you may ask? That's a good question. The answer is that we decided to give our builds only to those, who have access to our testers forum. To get access into there, you must ask it.

Main reasons for this decision are:
1) if those releases were public, users would install it to production sites and ask for support
2) we need bug reports, not downloads
3) to have only a few testers allows us to give personal support to get bugs fixed

If you feel that you have time to systematically test our internal releases, please contact me: matias.griese @ Skype and say first keywords "Kunena 1.6 testing".

I couldn't agree more, Matias!

There is a treasure trove of information about K 1.6 and I have material for many weeks of articles about the new version. There just aren't enough hours in the day to help the users with their questions, test the new versions and write about my latest discoveries. I wish I could do more.

What I have said, and what I will continue to stress, is that K 1.6 is a radically different product to K 1.5 that some people will take to enthusiastically while others will find some of the new changes will present new challenges for them.

As Matias has said, the development team is looking for serious testers, not people who want simply want to get a preview of the new product and will not provide feedback. We need people who will take the testing seriously, to test the functionality exhaustively, not only to detect programming errors but also to locate flaws in the architecture and way the product operates under real-world conditions. We also need people to help document the new system so that when users ask the inevitable questions "how do I do ---- in K 1.6" we will be ready for them. If you can help in any of these ways please PM any of the admins or moderators for further information.

sozzled wrote:

the development team is looking for serious testers, not people who want simply want to get a preview of the new product

Indeed sozzled, there's need of rational work, not passive and hormones-driven preview-watching

I'm very interested in testing K1.6, already contributed by translating language files to Italian and I would like to keep on doing my part to contribute.

Unfortunately I don't have Skype installed, I just sent a PM to Matias, hope I can help.

Matias wrote:

Geez, thanks from your comments. There are many other new features and improvements that Sozzled has not shared to you. One example is how you edit your profile. Maybe next set of screenshots will reveal it to you..?

Oh buddy you are very welcomed. I am so happy with Kunena and I still can't believe this is free for all of us. I feel very privileged being able to use this great system for free.

I visit these forums on a daily basis and sometimes on an hourly basis just to see what is going on. I try really hard to abstain from asking you guys questions and instead I do searches to keep me occupied and from going crazy. I do wish to help you guys out in testing and hopefully learn more than I already know about how Kunena works internally.

Keep up the great work you guys, I know how mentally exhausting this can be and I hope you guys accomplish everything you guys have envisioned for the next Kunena release.

A long-standing bone of contention that many users have had with Kunena has been with date formats! Date formats have been a hodge-podge affair. In some cases dates are shown relatively to now (e.g. 5 weeks ago) or they're displayed in the US (American) date/time format (e.g. 2/11/2010)!

This ongoing issue has been the catalyst for a number of requests to change this behaviour (see UserVoice for samples) as well as user-designed hacks to correct the situation. Of course, user hacks to correct the behaviour, to tailor date formats to our own locales, last only as long as the version for which they were designed: as soon as a new release of Kunena is rolled-out, we have to do them all over again!

I am excited to inform you that K 1.6 changes all of that. No longer will we "foreigners" have to put up with American date formats, K 1.6 allows a variety of different formats that will suit most of our needs! :woohoo:

Here are two screenshots that illustrate a couple of the new features. In the first one (below) you will see that the date time is displayed in its familiar "relative time format" but you will also notice that, hovering the mouse over the time will display the absolute time in a format that I prefer to see it!


In the second image below, you will see that the userlist shows the date and time when a user joined (or last visited the forum) in a much more preferable style (for my purposes, at least).


At long last we won't be left wondering if 2/11 means 2 November (as it does to me and 90% of the world's population) or 11 February (as it does to people in the USA). This is fan-bloody-tastic! But the best news is that, whatever date format you choose from the Kunena Configuration Settings facility, the format is used consistently throughout your forum: category views, messages, user profiles, user lists ... everywhere.