Question Benefits of K 5.0 over K 4.0

This topic is to assist people who may be wondering about K 5.0 and what benefits it provides over those who use K 4.0. I am using the information posted by the developers together with some topics posted on this forum as the basis for the making my overall assessment.

What is Kunena version 5.0?

K 5.0 is an an extension package (comprising a component and several plugins) developed for J! 3.5. That is, K 5.0 requires J! 3.5 in order for it to be installed. Put another way, K 5.0 cannot be installed on Joomla versions before J! 3.5.0 .

K 4.0.x, on the other hand, can be installed on J! 2.5 and J! 3.x. This may be important to people who are still using J! 2.5^[1] . There is limited support for K 4.0 from the development team for people who use J! 2.5 websites.

Support for PHP 7

While it is important for some users^[2] , K 5.0 supports PHP 7 as well as PHP 5, whereas K 4.0 cannot operate in PHP 7 environments. With the take-up of PHP 7 confined to around 5% of all Joomla users, it will probably take some time before PHP 7 to gain widespread use.

One of the claimed benefits of PHP 7 is that code is executed two or three times faster. Again, this may be a factor where people operate large websites and performance is a consideration. For most people running small sites, this is probably nothing they will be concerned about (or interested in) unless they are involved in software development as their core business or if they have other Joomla extensions installed that are totally dependent on PHP 7 support.

Availability of third-party templates

At the time of writing, with K 5.0 still in pre-production (i.e. release candidate) phase, there are no third-party templates for this version of Kunena.

There are a range of third-party template options for K 4.0 apart from the two that are included in the installation kit (viz. Crypsis and Blue Eagle). It has only been in the last couple of weeks that third-party template options for K 4.0, other than those based on the Blue Eagle version, became available based on the HMCV model^[3] .

The obvious benefit in using K 5.0 is for those who have never used Kunena before and those people who are already using Crypsis^[4] .

New features

K 5.0 has a few new features. Perhaps, more importantly, however, is the fact that a number of current defects with K 4.0 have been attended to by the developers and, although it has not been publicly stated anywhere, K 4.0 looks certain to reach end-of-life within a fairly short space of time.

Some of the new features include a "star-rating" system. The rating system is purely indicative, of course, and local within the confines of the website; that is, it has no microdata value as far as search engines are concerned.

Apart from the star-rating feature, K 5.0 is supposed to "integrate" with other Joomla extensions such as Easy Social, Easy Profile, Easy Blog, Altauserpoints, Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Whatsapp, Instagram and Sound Cloud.

Better reliability

I cannot comment on the reliability of K 5.0 (or whether it has fewer bugs than K 4.0) until a stable version is available and becomes fully supported by the team. Currently K 5.0 is in "release candidate" phase.

This summarises the benefits of K 5.0 over K 4.0. Other people can contribute (or argue/debate what I've written) as they choose.

Cheers
_________
Notes:
^[1] J! 2.5 has been at end-of-life since 31-Dec-2014 . This does not affect me personally because I do not have any J! 2.5 websites at the moment. This fact does affect the owners of this website which, at the time of writing, is based on J! 2.5.
^[2] PHP 7 is mainly used in hosted enviroments where the site developer has the option to choose different versions of PHP (e.g VPS, localhost/PC-hosted environments and the like). Until or unless my own webhost forces me to adopt PHP 7 I am content to remain with PHP 5.
^[3] The first HMVC-based third-party template that I saw announced was from JoomForest . Presumably, other developers may have commenced writing their own versions also.
^[4] Based on the configuration reports submitted to this forum, less than 5% of people reporting problems with K 4.0 are using Crypsis.

... whereas K 4.0 cannot operate in PHP 7 environments. ....

K 4.0.11 works fine in PHP 7 (Ubuntu).
But! K 5.0 way better than K 4.0.

Vasyekv wrote: K 4.0.11 works fine in PHP 7 (Ubuntu).

Thank you. Perhaps I should have written instead: K 4.0 does not support PHP 7 .

Vasyekv wrote: K 5.0 way better than K 4.0.

Perhaps you, too, would like to tell us why (and in what ways) you believe that to be the case.

Faster, better interface (front and back), Crypsis template has better support, not like in K 4.0.11, social network, works with bootstrap 2, 3 and without bootstrap, and more more.