Question Kunena 1.6.3 compatibility with Joomla 1.6.3 and info on Kunena 1.6.4?

Hello,

I hope this doesn't appear to be a nag. But, I have started building a site with Joomla 1.6.3. In addition to Joomla, I'm trying to use Community Builder and their Group Jive offering which requires Kunena to be able to provide forums to groups.

It would seem that, from what I have read in Kunena forums and seen else where, that there is a compatibility issue between Kunena 1.6.+ versions and Joomla 1.6.3. This I understand was caused by changes in the Joomla code in J 1.6.3 from J 1.6.2.

Is Kunena going to be completely unusable for Joomla 1.6.3 users, or is it just lacking some functionality? Can anyone elaborate on this any?

Also, And I know this is a touchy subject, but, Does Kunena have a time frame for the release of a version that is compatible with J 1.6.3? Do you expect it to be available before summer. mid summer, fall?

Thank you

G'day, Noel, welcome to Kunena and thank you for some very good questions.

nakins wrote: I hope this doesn't appear to be a nag. But, I have started building a site with Joomla 1.6.3.

I hope you have read, first, K 1.6 Technical Requirements . This may have saved you some time searching for the answers.

nakins wrote: In addition to Joomla, I'm trying to use Community Builder and their Group Jive offering which requires Kunena to be able to provide forums to groups.

I don't know if GroupJive's dependence on Kunena is a requirement or not. That's something you should discuss with the good folks at Joomlapolis .

nakins wrote: It would seem that, from what I have read in Kunena forums and seen else where, that there is a compatibility issue between Kunena 1.6.+ versions and Joomla 1.6.3. This I understand was caused by changes in the Joomla code in J 1.6.3 from J 1.6.2.

There have been numerous problems with Joomla 1.6 and, until all the issues in Joomla 1.6 have been sorted out, there will continue to be some functionality issues with any version of Kunena that has been released or any future releases of Kunena. Although K 1.6.3 improves, in terms of the operability of Kunena under a J! 1.6 environment, it falls short of the expectations that the Kunena project team had when K 1.6 development commenced over a year ago.

I think it's also fair to say that J! 1.6 falls short of many expectations that people in the Joomla community have had during the 2½ years it has taken to eventually release J! 1.6 and the release of J! 1.6 was greeted with under-whelming enthusiasm by long-time users of Joomla. J! 1.6 was not quite the silver bullet that a lot of people had hoped for.

In the time that J! 1.6 has been available (from 10 January this year) over 400 issues have been identified in Joomla resulting in the release of J! 1.6.3. J! 1.6.3 still has problems and these problems will probably not be fixed (or even looked at) before the release of J! 1.7 which is expected in July. From the time that J! 1.6.0 was released, Kunena project team members have invested a huge amount of effort into making Kunena a native J! 1.6 extension.

K 1.6.4 (which is still not publicly available at this time) is a considerable improvement in terms of completing this J! 1.6 native extension development process. In working through the Kunena side of the development, the team has also been working with the Joomla developers to fix the problems within Joomla itself.

nakins wrote: Is Kunena going to be completely unusable for Joomla 1.6.3 users, or is it just lacking some functionality? Can anyone elaborate on this any?

K 1.6.4 (when it is released) may still not meet all the demanding requirements (and expectations) that some people will have. We understand that but the team cannot fix everything in Joomla (and I don't think the team should fix everything in Joomla) that is broken or does not allow the attainment of 100% full "native J! 1.6 extension" status.

There has never been any claim by the Kunena project that any version to date was fully "compliant" with J! 1.6. What we can say is all versions of Joomla (before J! 1.6.3) are unsuitable for use with Kunena. We can also say the situation we have with Kunena, at the present time, is that there will be some parts of J! 1.6 functionality that are yet to be "enabled" or fully utilised within the forum. We know, too, that users of K 1.6 with J! 1.6 will have a few special issues that they will need to attend to in order to hit the ground running with Kunena. Most of these issues are cosmetic; some of them (in terms of J! 1.6 ACL functions) may be more difficult. The bottom-line is that J! 1.6 is a massive paradigm shift from previous versions of Joomla and we are all learning how to deal with the new problems that are involved in the learning curve.

Lastly, until the Joomla Extension Directory gives it's "seal of approval" to K 1.6 as a native J! 1.6 extension, we need to be wary of saying how "compliant" Kuunena really is and how much support we can give to people who are using J! 1.6.

What I would say is this: K 1.6.4 will be better - a whole heap better. Would I recommend J! 1.6.3? That's not for me to say; that's for everyone to decide for themselves. What people need to do is to equip themselves with a detailed knowledge about what J! 1.6 can do (and what it cannot do) and decide for themselves if this is the way to go.

Can we classify K 1.6.4 as a native J! 1.6 extension? It is only my opinion that, with all of the caveats that I have mentioned earlier in this topic, I can see no reason why K 1.6.4 should not be classed as a native J! 1.6 extension. However we might as well also ask if any other extension, with the range of functionality present in Kunena, can be truly classed as 100% fully-compliant with J! 1.6 also. Therefore, given the limits of our understanding of J! 1.6.3 - of what it is capable and what it is not capable of - I think we can say that K 1.6.4 should be considered the first version of Kunena that would classify it as a J! 1.6 native extension. Does this mean that anything you can do in K 1.6.4 on J! 1.5.23 will work the same way in J! 1.6.3? I don't know the answer to that question. No-one does.

nakins wrote: Does Kunena have a time frame for the release of a version that is compatible with J 1.6.3?

See K 1.6.4

Sozzled

That's a useful and informative reply. Thanks for taking the time to post that.

However, I'm just interested in K1.6.x working as advertised with J1.5.x

In particular, I'm waiting patiently for the 'Discussions in Jomsocial groups are now saved and synched in Kunena thanks to a specific plugin' as listed in the K1.6.3 release notes ( www.kunena.org/blog/developer-blog/78-kunena-163-released ) but supported via a currently un-released plug-in.

Any sign of that?

Peter