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iLucato: You understand that users do not have to register twice - once for Kunena and once for VirtueMart - because that was what this discussion topic was about.

Now that we're not confused by that issue, nor are we confused by the other issues that resulted in this discussion going off-topic, am I correct in assuming that your question is "How can I change Kunena so that it uses my VirtueMart registration page?" Would that be a fair re-statement of your question?

What "different" registration page does Kunena send your users too? Perhaps this is a restriction in Kunena because there's no integration with VirtueMart and, in this case, you may need to remove or change the registration link for Kunena. I don't know.

The central question to this discussion is: Do users have to register twice - to use Kunena and for VirtueMart? The answer is no.

After that question was answered, this discussion went off-topic. I repeat, I do not know how VirtueMart works. If you have questions about VirtueMart, please use their support forums .

Good idea. Some other registration processes provide an automatically-generated "welcome to the site" message. Whether this should be incorporated into Kunena is a different subject, IMO, but maybe it could/should be a "feature request". What do others think?

G'day, paulgreco, and welcome to Kunena.

Before you post topics into the Support category, it helps to read the hints posted in K 1.5.x Support: Please read this first. . Changing things is not usually in the line of support - we're more interested to make things work they way that they were designed. However, sometimes they don't and sometimes we need to change things.

So, let's start again:

1) What version of Kunena are you using?

2) What Kunena template are you using?

3) What version of Joomla are you using?

4) Are you using sh404SEF and, if so, what version are you using?

5) Do the symptoms of your problem occur if you disable sh404SEF?

6) Are you using other, third-party extensions for user registration and login and, if so, what versions of them are you using?

7) If you are using other, third-party extensions for user registration and login, do the symptoms of your problem occur if you disable them?

8) What "integration options" have you chosen in your Kunena configuration settings? Have you installed the other software that you want to integrate Kunena with?

G'day, herve123, and welcome to Kunena.

I don't know how VirtueMart works as far as user registration is concerned but, because it works with Joomla I would imagine that if people register on your website using the standard Joomla registration procedure then they're registered to use VirtueMart and they've also registered to use Kunena. However, I could be wrong because (as I said) I don't know too much about VirtueMart.

But I do know about Kunena and Kunena doesn't have a "registration procedure" of its own: Kunena uses whatever your website uses for user registration. So, if your users use Joomla to register, then Kunena knows about your users, too. If you use JomSocial then Kunena knows about the users. If you use Community Builder then Kunena knows about the users. Kunena doesn't use a different user table to login to your website. Kunena does keep a table of user attributes (like whether someone is a moderator or what avatar they are using in the forum), just like JomSocial holds information about a user's birth date or Community Builder might have other information about the user.

So, I guess that VirtueMart holds special information about what things the users can advertise, buy or sell on your website. What I am saying is that your users shouldn't have to register twice at your website ... that just sounds uncharacteristic of Joomla.

What do the folks at VirtueMart have to say?

G'day, mathialoc, and welcome to Kunena.

I don't know whether "anonymous" posting can be selected on a category-by-category basis - I thought that there was a Forum Configuration setting that controlled this, but I could be mistaken.

If your users are having registration difficulties (and these matters fall outside of Kunena) I would suggest that you try to work with your users to understand what those difficulties are. Most times these difficulties arise because users have not "activated" their account and this occurs because the "activation e-mail" is put into the user's junk mail folder - where the user doesn't look. That's not the only reason. It's also possible that you haven't setup email properly on your Joomla website. I suggest you look at the Joomla help forum for discussion around those issues.

This question has been asked before and, at this stage, there's not much help that I can suggest. I'm sure you didn't intend it in your question, but to clarify a couple of issues for a few of our newer users, Kunena isn't responsible for user registration or login. In this sense, perhaps the following statement might help point you in the right direction:

Kunena is not responsible for user registration, pure and simple. User registration is a Joomla function that may, or may not, be assisted by other components such as JomSocial or Community Builder or others. Kunena makes it possible to utilise these other components.

Some of these other extensions include the means to require users to read and acknowledge the site's terms of use (code of conduct, conditions and responsibilities, site policy or whatever you call it).

Perhaps, one day, Kunena will have its own user registration/profiling/social networking features but these do not exist at the moment in the form that many users seem to want. Does that help you?

There is only one endorsed and supported Kunena template ... default_ex

But I have this suspicion in the back of my mind that maybe this problem was generated by the original version of CB 1.2.1 (you may be able to confirm this yourself by browsing the various topics that I referred to earlier) and, if so, the developers of Community Builder may have fixed this with a patch to CB. I know that there were a few problems with CB 1.2.1 that impacted on Kunena. Another alternative is for you to upgrade to CB 1.2.2. I'm sorry but, as I said earlier, I don't use CB any more to manage Kunena user profiles. I use CB for user registration, login and avatar image management and that's about the extent of my need for it. Furthermore, as I have been so involved with helping out with K 1.6 development I haven't had the opportunity, yet, to see what CB 1.2.2 is all about. But, I would suggest that you try it, anyway, and let us know if it solves your problem.

I'm perfectly happy to accept criticism when it's warranted and, for my part, I may not have made myself totally clear. However, we need to remember that this whole incident has nothing to do with Kunena.

I accept that Kunena has a number of dependencies: the main dependency that Kunena relies upon is Joomla (J! 1.5.15 actually). Like every other Joomla component - Kunena is a component - you need to create a menu item if you want a "shorthand" way for your users to access the component. You can access the component by referring to to it's "Joomla name" (e.g. /component/kunena) as Matias wrote and, in that sense, your component is not dependent on having a menu item for it for your users to access it. Whether that menu item is published (i.e. visible) on your main menu is immaterial (and that's what I should have written instead). So, yes, Kunena is dependent on creating a menu item for it if you want to resolve URLs like <site>/forum. The same holds true for every other Joomla component that you want you users to access from your website "frontend".

But this isn't how this discussion topic began. The discussion topic began on the premise that, prior to deleting a couple of Kunena categories, your installation had no problems. After deleting the categories everything fell apart. What you omitted to explain was that you had not followed the technical requirements (one of the first points mentioned in the documentation that I referred you to) and we were left to surmise what was the cause.

The support category is the most important category for us. As forum moderators, our job is not to solve problems posted here; our job is to ascertain the facts, assess the severity of the situation and put users in touch with the resources appropriate to their situation. I believe that I have acted in accordance with those principles.

We don't know our users' proficiency with Kunena, Joomla or with website management and, for many of our users, English is not their native language. I think it would be highly unfair of us to ask (before we offered a suggestion, hint or solution) "so how much to do know in order for me to prepare an appropriate response?" I think it's fair to assume that, unless our users clearly state otherwise, they have a basic understanding of how Joomla works and they have read the "read me" documentation before they start asking questions. Thank you for your suggestions on how I might behave in future but, on this matter, I can't accept that conclusion.

Occasionally we get things wrong - we're human - but you should also remember that we volunteer our time and energy to help as best we can. I'm sorry we did not solve the problem sooner and I am sorry for the part I played in it. I think there was a communication problem all around.

OK, Zentra, let's get this problem of yours solved: create the menu item for Kunena. Then, after you've created the menu item, see if links from your mod_custom module take you to your Kunena forum instead of taking you to your site registration page. As I tried to imply in K 1.5.x Support: Please read this first , we take issues of support very seriously - they're our highest priority concern - because we want to make sure that any genuine defect that's found in Kunena is not passed on to the general user community.

Many "problems", in fact, can be avoided if people familiarise themselves with some important Kunena concepts (and a few Joomla ones, too ).

I understand that a lot of material in the documentation Wiki is conceptual (or, as you chose to describe it, "high level") but it's vital to grasp the concepts as best you can in order to prepare yourself for the inevitable problems that come along. If you have a better suggestion for how the documentation Wiki articles should be written to assist others - in particular, new users - we would be most grateful for your ideas and contributions.

Thank you.

I'm sorry. It seems to me that we're both chasing a moving target in different directions. Yes, by all means, you should try to resolve the problems yourself. As a moderator, my role isn't to attempt to become the all-knowing technical expert who can fix your problem or anyone else's problem for them; my job is to be able to put you in touch with other resources, other sources of information or other people who might be able to help you.

I'm reconsidering the comment that I made in my previous post: I'm still having difficulties making the connection of the relevance of the point you made about Kunena being "totally dependent" on having a menu item. Yes, you can create links (in any page) whether you use a custom module or whether you embed them into a Joomla article and, as long at the URL references are resolved, they will take your users to the recent discussions or the categories views of Kunena.

I am assuming that, from what you wrote, that you can still use references like /forum/latest and forum/listcat and that these work, even though you don't have a menu item for Kunena. Is that right?

Zentra wrote:

After I deleted non-published sub-categories and created one new, this stopped working

OK, let's stop right here and examine the crucial word "this". What is "this"? Let's look at the next sentence:

Zentra wrote:

Links from the module went to registration page.

Now, because you have mentioned this mod_custom module I am assuming that the links, taking you to the registration page, are emanating from the mod_custom module and not from Kunena. But what puzzles me is where did those links point to? If they pointed to an unpublished sub-category, I have no idea where your users would have been taken to. Perhaps it was mere good luck, rather than good management, that allowed the mechanism to succeed? Questions, questions, questions!

Now, the next sentence has me completely confused:

If I entered the link to the forum start, /forum, I could get to the Forum start page (set to Categories) but clicking any internal link in Kunena such as "Latest discussions" [or] any topic, it went to the registration page.

Yes, that's a real puzzlement. If you read the basic installation notes in the Wiki , point 4 of the "overall procedure" states:

Create a menu link in you main menu (important)

Aside from the spelling mistake ("you" should be "your") this is important because it makes things easier for you. As for Kunena being totally dependent on having this menu item, that's a completely separate discussion, because there actually are ways that you can avoid the necessity, but I don't see any need to go down that path.

So, this leaves you us with a few questions to answer:

• What is it that you want to work?
• Do you have a menu item, anywhere, that has the alias name "forum" and, if not, what's stopping you from having one?
• What was the specific address of the link that you were using in the past that took your users to your forum but, after deleting an unpublished sub-category (or two) and creating a new one, now takes you to the registration page?

I'm sorry, I can't answer the question "what conditions do Kunena link to the registration page?" and I'm not sure if attempting to answer that question really helps you. Let's look at what you want to do first, OK?

I'm sorry, but I'm really trying to help you and I have the feeling that I'm not asking the right questions. Perhaps, if you provided us with a link to your website, together with a picture of what you're using to access Kunena, we could see the problem? What do you think?

As we informed you before, your problems have nothing to do with Kunena. Kunena is not responsible for user registration, login or logout: these are Joomla matters that may be assisted by other extensions (like JomSocial or Community Builder) but the fact remains that user registration issues have nothing to do with Kunena!

There may be many reasons why people are not receiving their account activation e-mail: maybe the emails are being sent to the users' junk mail? Maybe your Joomla website is not setup properly to send email? Have you explored these avenues of investigation?

This is not the Joomla help desk. Although we are frequently drawn into discussions about Joomla but we can only offer general advice because we are not "experts" in Joomla. I believe we have tried to show you where to get the information you need. I am genuinely trying to help you. If our help is inadequate for your needs, please visit forum.joomla.org and ask there. Thank you B)

Thank you for your question, Mikkel.

Login problems seem to be a recurring issue for many of the users and we receive a continuous stream of questions about login redirection . As I have always tried to make the point in this discussion forum, login, logout and registration are not actually functions that are performed by Kunena: these are Joomla issues or they involve various third-party products (like Community Builder or Jomsocial) that assist users with those functions. Even so, K 1.5 (or even K 1.0 or its predecessors) have always been problematic.

As I also wrote ( Kunena 1.6 - A dingo took my login ... ? ) these problems have been finally addressed (and solved) with K 1.6 ... and that's welcome news, isn't it?

In the meantime, I suggest you read through the many discussions (see the first link I posted above) that we've had in the past about ways you can work around your problem.

You can crack this nut with a nutcracker or with a sledgehammer:

1. You can have one website, one Kunena forum, two categories, two types of users. You can restrict access to each category based on the user type. This is the nutcracker option. It means you can develop complementary information for the site in one place and the site can serve a multiplicity of purposes
2. You can create two sties, one Kunena forum each site. Each site has its own registration/login procedure and you can thus limit access to materials based on who is allowed to register and use the site. Information that is common to both sites either has to be duplicated or held in one or other site with some bridge between the two. This is the sledgehammer option.

There is a third option: one site acts as a portal between two other sites, each site has it's own separate forum, user database, etc. and the portal contains the common information of the two subordinate sites. I've seen this option used quite successfully.

Bottom line: one Kunena instance per Joomla site.

If you want to have, say Kunena and Brand X software running concurrently, this may be possible as long as there are no conflicts between the two. For example, you cannot run Fireboard concurrently with Kunena because they share similar data structures but they operate on different software platforms and their interaction with one another will cause operational problems. In effect, Kunena clobbers Fireboard and vice versa.

From the user's point of view, running two different forums on one site may not present any problems (unless there are occasions when data is unexpected altered by unforeseen circumstances) but from a website management viewpoint this situation creates a time-bomb, trying to keep different forum software up-to-date and out of each other's way. Therefore, I suggest you stick to the one forum software and learn well how to manage it.

Perhaps, in these circumstances, Joomla is not a viable option and maybe you should consider free-standing forum products to crack this nut.

I have a few suggestions to make:

1. In future, when posting questions to this website (particularly when you post them to the Support category): K 1.5.x Support: Please read this first. This will save you time and it will save us time.
2. Kunena is not responsible for user registration, pure and simple. User registration is a Joomla function that may, or may not, be assisted by other components such as JomSocial or Community Builder or others; you do not need these other components to run Kunena but Kunena makes it possible to utilise these other components. In short user registration - and whatever text is involved in the confirmation email sent to users - is not are not a Kunena issue.
3. If you are using the standard Joomla user registration procedure, contact help.joomla.org about your issue. If you are using some other user registration procedure, contact the developer of that software. Kunena does not have a user registration procedure.
4. Support for Kunena is limited to the latest stable release. Please upgrade from K 1.5.9.