Question Why is is necessary for Kunena to have its own user tables?

as newbie maybe a silly question but why is it still necessary to have "own user tables" in kunena instead of using native joomla fields ?

I would assume this allows the kunena team to create new profile fields when required without tampering with the core joomla tables?

Hi not sure, because each member has a universal id to which i would expect to link all the other fields ....

whitemike wrote: Hi not sure, because each member has a universal id to which i would expect to link all the other fields ....

"Other fields"? Like what?

You will find that all discussion forum software products maintain a table of forum users. These tables provide information to the forum software about things such as forum privileges, forum "rankings" and demographic data such as gender. Kunena is no different.

The kind of information I mentioned is not available in the Joomla user tables.

Joomla provides fields like birthday , address, but as far as i can see, Kunena is not taking over this info.

With the Standard Joomla ACL since V3 i would expect to set as well special rights via global and not specific in the Kunena component

Looking at other forums software i agree, but they have the problem, that they do not have a CMS as a base, which i see as one of the biggest advantages of kunena.

Personally find that the default joomla user profile fields insufficient and ended up using community builder which in effect made the joomla & kunena profile fields redundant.

I think this is something the Joomla CMS has to change to allow flexible profile fields, only then would components such as kunena have the possibility to take advantage of it.

Hello,

The use of his own table for users in Kunena has been designed before the existence of Joomla! 3.x series.

xillibit is right part of the problem is this is a result from legacy use of database tables and associated fields and has not been optimized to the latest usecases.

A more technical reason some items are redundant in Joomla and Kunena is for speed. As in some queries we are already looking up in our own table for specific information. Having to join information from the Joomla user table for our usecases in Kunena user table could affect performance. Joining data from two different tables in SQL can be an expensive operation.

This reason is not completely valid, there are places we can optimize.

totally agree: Personally find that the default joomla user profile fields insufficient and ended up using community builder which in effect made the joomla & kunena profile fields redundant.

to come around i would have expected to have the possibility to add additional fields via admin in Kunena.