The Kunena team has heard the community and has produced K 3.0.8.  The announcement about K 3.0.8 was better handled than was the case with its predecessor with messages posted in the forum, on Twitter and in Google+.  The best news that I have seen is that the Joomla autoupdate feature works with K 3.0.8.

Although there are a couple of minor issues with this version—and from all accounts the developers are looking to fix those things in K 3.0.9—most of the reported problems have been attended to.

It is unusual for a maintenance release to add new features but a welcome improvement is that the team has looked at improving search engine page rankings by replacing <H2> elements with <H1> elements.  This change may affect the way that some Kunena templates are displayed on users’ websites but I don’t think these problems are impossible to overcome.  It was unfortunate to read in one case where a member of the community was unable to employ K 3.0.8 on his site and he felt compelled to downgrade to K 3.0.7.

However, a significant problem (discussed in a previous article) remains for K 3.0.8 concerning the recommended installation (or upgrade) method described in the Kunena Wiki site.

K 3.0.8 installation problems

As I mentioned in a previous article, Joomla intends to retire its JoomlaCode repository (and move away from Sourceforge).  With the release of K 3.0.7, the Kunena developers have relocated the latest Kunena installation kits to GitHub.  The developers seem to remain unaware of problems facing people who use on the “Install from URL” option (as recommended in the upgrade guide) or they continue to refuse to acknowledge the existence of problems people have with this method.

The “Install from URL” method is best illustrated by looking at the series of screenshots shown below; click the images below to see the series of dialogs and the error message that appears at the end.

Again, I'm not arguing about the “theory”—that people might also have problems updating to Joomla (or other Joomla extensions) because of Github—although I still have not seen any reports on the Joomla forum that theorise in this manner. It is still apparent that the developers have not tried this method themselves or they are not taking these complaints seriously. I will let my readers decide for themselves what they perceive to be the case.

Until this matter is taken seriously by the Kunena team, the recommended installation method is untrustworthy and people should, instead, attempt a different approach or report the problems to the Kunena team until a better, reliable way is worked out to resolve this important installation issue.

Kunena 3.0.8: “no message in message body” bug

The developers have partly-fixed the “no message in message body” bug. The problems began in K 3.0.7. The developers have fixed the problem affecting users who post a message consisting only of a video clip.  It is good that this part of the problem has been fixed, however the developers have not also looked at a related problem:  an error occurs if you post a message wrapped in the Kunena BBcode confidential tag (and you write nothing else).  A workaround is to add some other text to the end of your forum message but, as far as I can tell, this second issue has not been acknowledged by the developers.

Although this is a relatively minor problem (and may not affect a lot of people) it is something you else should put on your watch list of considerations before you update to K 3.0.8.

What’s next for Kunena?

My next article will discuss the current situation with the beta trials of K 4.0.  I know that the Kunena team members (who visit this site more than anyone else on an almost daily basis) will be interested to read my comments.  It is, however, a little disappointing that a couple of the developers have not welcomed my running commentary.  After my last article was published here, one of them wrote to me saying “Although some of what you have written in your blog is true, you are not winning any friends here.”  I guess that's a fair point from his perspective but my aim is not to win a team of admirers.  My aim is to assit the community by improving the quality of this work.

You have enemies? Good. That means you've stood up for something, sometime in your life.Winston Churchill

Yes, it is possible that people could argue the factuality of parts of what I have written (although I have made every attempt to check and double-check my facts) but, on the whole I stand by what I have written.  The Kunena team have their own means of producing their own counter-factuals and I have no quarrel with that.  I noted that the person who wrote to me saying that my articles were not “winning friends” has not, himself, contributed a measurable iota of help to the project in over six months.  It illustrates the maxim, “those who cannot help constructively only criticise those who do.”

One final piece of news:  the team members have informed me that they are no longer maintaining or updating their Facebook page and the link has been removed from the website.

About the author:

Michael Russell has worked in the information technology industry since 1971 and, since retiring from the workforce in 2007, is a website hobbyist specialising in Joomla, a former member of the Kunena project for more than 8 years, and contributor on The Joomla Forum™. The opinions expressed in this article are entirely those of the author. View his profile here.