Question Kunena 1.6 - a moderator's view

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…

It's good that coder4life mentioned Mootools 1.2! One of the necessities for K 1.6 is the new Mootools 1.2 library. Because this has not yet shipped with Joomla 1.5.15, those of us who have been involved in alpha testing K 1.6 have had to install this system plugin separately.

I haven't discussed with the developers how it is planned to include this library of Javascript utilities into the K 1.6 alpha installation kit (for those pre-J! 1.5.16) or how to check if users are running J! 1.5.16 (and therefore don't need another version of Mootools 1.2 on their test sites) but it's an interesting question and thank you for raising the subject.

This is a good time to discuss what users will need when K 1.6 alpha becomes available for download.

In the early days of Kunena 1.6 alpha is is very important, it is critical to the success of this project, that a few simple guidelines are followed by all testers. If people don't have a clear understanding of what is expected we could find ourselves in for unnecessary delays while we try to clear up points of confusion or misunderstanding.

I must stress again: K 1.6 alpha is only for testing purposes. It is not to be used on live websites.

We must assume that testers will be using the simplest, most basic Joomla installations on their test sites. If you are not using the simplest, most basic Joomla installation on your test site, you are not helping yourselves and you are not helping the developers.

Experienced users of these forums would be aware over 90% of all problems that users encounter have nothing to do with Kunena. User problems are, in the most part, unique and they're caused by, or result from, the combination of server platform, mixture of site software components, Joomla and any optional extensions of Joomla that the user has installed. It is important for Kunena to work with as many different platforms as possible but that is a longer-term goal and will have to wait until we are in a beta testing phase before we can address those other matters. In the immediate timeframe it's necessary to establish that Kunena core functionality operates within a common test environment.

The following is a list of my recommendations for that test environment:

1. Joomla 1.5.15 as the absolute minumum running in "native" mode (i.e. the System - Legacy plugin is disabled) with Mootools 1.2 system plugin installed and enabled.
2. One of the three standard Joomla site templates: rhuk_milkyway, JA_Purity or Beez
3. Kunena (obviously)
4. (optionally) JoomlaPack 2.4.1 (or its successor Akeeba Backup - even though 3.0 is still in alpha) or some other mechanism for making snapshot backups of your test site

In addition to this software mix, you may want to install JomSocial, Community Builder, uddeIM and/or AlphaUserPoints. If you install any of these, please take note of which version you are using.

If testers depart from a standard installation this only confuses the situation for the rest of us.

Sorry, no glamorous screenshots for this posting.

I'll just add to this discussion that Kunena 1.6 is on the verge of a public alpha. It was originally going to be a limited upgrade with a lot of bug fixes from legacy code. But we took it a step further and thought of it more as a stepping stone to Kunena 2.0, which is basically a total rewrite. Kunena 1.6 has a lot of code that will be transferable to K 2.0 so we don't feel like we're wasting development efforts by tossing out Kunena 1.6 for Kunena 2.0.

On the point of Mootools, Kunena 1.6 will use version MT 1.2. Users who are already using jQuery on their sites will welcome this because of the noConflict mode which plagues many MT 1.1 users. Joomla 1.5.x has already been mostly converted to MT 1.2 and it will be included in an upcoming release (Joomla 1.6 already uses MT 1.2). For the more adventurous, you can test this out now or download the beta plugin ( read the discussion ). We will release an updated version of this plug-in alongside the alpha release.

To reiterate, this is a test version. The forum is looking solid and is VERY fast. I'm personally going to use it for an upcoming client project so we've been doing some testing and we're very pleased with the optimizations and new features. Hang in there just a bit longer. It'll be worth the wait!