Important K 1.6.5 situation report

Many members of the community are concerned with the recent developments occurring with Joomla:

• The release of J! 1.7.0
• The retirement of J! 1.6.x and the withdrawal of support for that series on 10 August this year;
• Kunena that is compatible with J! 1.5, J! 1.6 and J 1.7; and
• Fixing problems with K 1.6.4

The Kunena project team has been aware of these issues for quite some time and has been making steady progress. Changes made by the Joomla development team in the release of J! 1.7.0 have, unfortunately, created unforeseen extra work for the project.

These changes also occurred at a time when the project was, itself, undergoing restructuring in the way that the software development had been managed. These coinciding factors occurred together to make things more difficult than the team had expected.

At this time, the project team has a limited range of options. It is planned to release K 1.6.5 later today but this release will contain a few issues that cannot be resolved immediately. The project wishes to reassure the Kunena community that these issues are not show-stoppers but some people will need to be prepared as a result of upgrading to K 1.6.5 when the release is done. These issues are:

(1) Only with English language support; translators will need to spend time - probably an hour - to check those untranslated strings and to provide suitable language packs for those people who need them.

(2) Other language translations to be made by the translators as soon as practicable after the release of K 1.6.5 and posted on the forum.

(3) A further release (K 1.6.6) will be offered when all language translations have been updated.

The release of J! 1.6.6 will also help a lot of people who are fearful of the XSS security vulnerability found in earlier releases of J! 1.6 and who feel compelled to upgrade to J! 1.7.0 (assuming that they're taken everything else into consideration and they're actually able to make the jump).

We expect to be able to make an announcement about the availability f K 1.6.5 later today.

You may discuss this implications of the matters mentioned here in [Merged topic] Joomla 1.7 and implications for Kunena

Further to my earlier advice, work has progressed. We now hope that there will not be the problems with non-English versions of Kunena that were previously expected. Further announcements on the availability of K 1.6.5 will be made as information comes to hand.

Unavoidable delays have postponed K 1.6.5 beyond original expectations. These things happen. We are now testing the final "release candidate" version of K 1.6.5, as a matter of the highest urgency, prior to making it available to the general community. We do not anticipate any difficulties at this time and we should be in a better position to release in a few hours from now.

For your information, the forum here at www.kunena.org has been upgraded to K 1.6.5. In doing so, we have a live production environment in which we can see whether there are serious problems that would prevent a release of K 1.6.5 to the wider community. I'm sure that everyone wants the assurance that we've done as much as we possibly can to deliver a working solution while, at the same time, meeting the urgent demand to provide a solution that operates under J! 1.7 conditions.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.