Question Kunena 1.6 - a moderator's view

Threaded view is not planned for K 1.6 alfa/beta.

For those who haven't seen the movie (see msg #45772 ) the fact that it's attracted a bit of bad press :laugh: means that it's made an impact!

But I know that we're going to have to keep repeating these warnings because people are not going to spend 2 minutes 6 seconds of their precious lives looking at such stuff. So, here's the information again:

Kunena 1.6 is coming soon:

It will soon be here at www.kunena.com and you will soon be able to download it and test it for yourselves. But here are a few important warnings:

K 1.6 alpha is not for live sites. If you don't know what you're doing you could risk destroying your website. If you upgrade a K 1.5.x website (and you can) you are warned that there is no going back. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work. If you don't like it, you're stuck with it. Any customised changes, hacks, tweaks, "things" that you did in K 1.5.x will not work at all in K 1.6!

K 1.6 doesn't work with every Joomla site template. We don't care at this stage: K 1.6 is still in alpha development and it's changing every day. We're focusing our attention on rhuk_milkyway and JA_Purity templates.

There will be no support for K 1.6 alpha. If we receive questions that include any of the following terms, they will be ignored and the topics will be locked:

I've just installed K 1.6 and I can't make it work!
How can I go back to K 1.5.11?
Urgent help needed!
I cannot install K 1.6
Please tell me what to do next?
I've installed K 1.6 on my live website ...
Can you please fix this for me?

However, we are interested in receiving feedback on what things don't work, but don't post your messages in the Support category. We will make available a new category to receive your bug reports.

Another new feature of K 1.6 (that a lot of users will be excited to hear): users can delete their own messages.

But the news gets better: deleted messages are actually moved to a "trash" area and not permanently deleted until the site administrator empties the trash. Until that happens, messages can be undeleted as the following screenshot shows:



In this case, the "ordinary" registered user (test-user2) has deleted the second message that they posted in the thread. Other users cannot see this deleted message unless they have admin/moderator privileges. Note the appearance of the "undelete" button to restore the message to view.

The above image is a conceptualised view based on a work-in-progress. It is not intended to be an official endorsement of what the finished product will look like because the design is continually changing. It is meant to illustrate what people may encounter with the new version.

Also, please note: I made some important changes to the movie in msg #45772 . Please watch it again.

The new movie is much better!

Can't wait to install it on my test site!

I thought that threaded view was being included in K1.6. Has this changed?

Sincerely,
Howard

Threaded view (discussed here ) is not planned for K 1.6 alpha or beta (at this stage) as @quila wrote in msg #45813 .

Definitely everything looks cleaner though. Customizations look like they will be easier to manage.

In an earlier posting I referred to a Wiki article that I've referred to a lot but which needed to be overhauled, particularly in preparation for K 1.6. Actually, it makes a lot of sense to get the terminology right for K 1.5, too.

Although still a work-in-progress, please look at Sections, Categories, sub-Categories (Part 1) . It's still undergoing further revisions - as also is "part 2" - but I hope it will make it easier in future for users to setup categories.

In the past few weeks we have been clearing much of the old, out-dated, discussions that related to K 1.0.x (which was developed for Jooma 1.0.x) and, because Jooma 1.0 is no longer supported , K 1.0 is not supported either.

In carrying out this housekeeping, I came across an old discussion topic, Is Fireboard project officially "dead"? . Rather than resurrect this old topic, I wanted to use this opportunity to give users a few views of my own.

From a Kunena perspective, Fireboard is dead. It doesn't matter if Fireboard has been issued with an official death certificate or not but, for all practical purposes, it has been deceased for a very long time. Admittedly, the home page on this website refers to this forerunner of Kunena and K 1.0.x is essentially a reworking of Fireboard without many of the defects and problems that gave Fireboard a poor reputation among those who had installed it. Unfortunately, K 1.0.x inherited a lot of "issues" from Fireboard and it was not possible with the early releases of Kunena to completely eradicate them. Over time, and even after Kunena was made to work natively for J! 1.5, many of the old problems had been fixed but some still persist, even today, in K 1.5.11. Even in K 1.5.11, users may find the occasional reference to Fireboard in the source code; that's just an accident of happenstance.

If people believe that Kunena is simply a re-badging of Fireboard, they are mistaken. Work continues to replace tired, out-dated and defective functionality with reliable, robust and enhanced features. K 1.5.11 is a far cry from Fireboard 1.0.5 RC2 - which is where Fireboard development ceased nearly eighteen months ago.

It is my understanding that the Kunena development team is determined to produce a forum product in future that sharpens the divide between Kunena and the software that preceded it. This is a long and difficult process. Where K 1.5.x was largely a reworking of much of the code that began, years ago (even before Fireboard), nothing could be more different than with Kunena 1.6. Kunena 2.0 will be completely different again and will essentially be a top-down rewrite of the whole product.

In the coming months work will continue to expunge references to Fireboard (as, indeed, we will remove references to J! 1.0 from this site). You will see evidence of this work as we progressively overhaul the discussion categories in these forums - plans have already been made to do this work - the documentation Wiki and the downloads area. This will not happen overnight but the changes will be soon quite apparent.

Kunena 1.6 owes a substantial amount of its existence to the tireless and dedicated efforts of the development team. Users should not, however, get the impression that K 1.6 is just another version of Kunena (or Fireboard) with a different name. K 1.6 is the next stage in the evolution of a forum product that will be as different from K 1.5 as Homo Sapiens is different from Neanderthal man.

While these are, as always, only my opinions, I am certain that that the time has now arrived when we can give Fireboard a long-overdue burial.

@sozzled, where are those tasty screenshots

anyway wondering if we are waiting for Joomla 1.5.16, due this Friday, April 23, 2010 (maybe), which includes mootools 1.2, before our offical peak into K1.6...?

and I was also wondering about the design implications of keeping the share and and profile information when a user deletes a post. For convo sake, there should be some sort of placeholder showing that there is a break in the convo without all the post options available because there is really no need…