After my preliminary evaluation of Chronoforums [CF] as an alternative to Kunena (and taking the decision to install CF here), I am now in a position to give a report card on the product.  Obviously CF is different to Kunena and it would be unfair to criticise (or praise) CF because of those differences:  the two products have different features and, internally, they operate differently.  Some people will feel that CF does not have the range of features necessary to operate a forum on a Joomla website; the same criticism can also be levelled at Kunena, too.  It is my overall opinion, however, that while CF lacks some of Kunena's features, the absence of those features is not a show-stopper.  On the other hand, the presence of certain features in Kunena may prevent people from using it.  This article is concerned with Chronoforums.  If people want to compare CF against other products, that’s something people may do for themselves.

Purpose

Chronoforums is a Joomla extension.  This means it relies on Joomla for account creation, user login and forum access.

Chronoforums is a popular[1] forum product for Joomla. Perhaps the best example of its use is at the Chronoforums website.  It’s difficult to say how well this product will satisfy your requirements (because everyone is different) but, in general terms, CF provides the essential features needed to run a forum.  Lacking some features, a non-MVC internal design (and, therefore, making it somewhat difficult to adapt the component to suit different localities) and poor documentation may deter some people from using CF.  However, if you operate an English-language forum, require a basic range of features and you have the patience and willingness to persevere, you will probably find that CF will meet your purposes without needing to “tweak” it.  Generally-speaking, CF is fairly intuitive from the end-user perspective and should require little training of your users to make the most of it.  If your users are familiar with the basic features of a web-based discussion forum then they should have no trouble using it.

I have not seen CF used to run a large forum—with, say, tens of thousands of posts—and I have not been able to assess its overall performance on that basis.  I think it’s reasonable to conclude that CF would be tailored for a small-to-medium size forum site.

Installation / initial setup

Chronoforums is installed like any other Joomla extension.  Visit the developer’s website to locate the installation package.  After installing CF you will see a control panel where you can configure the extension—see the image on the right (click to enlarge the view).  There are four key areas that you should pay special attention to; these are labelled “1”, “2”, “3” and “4” in the picture.

1. Category Manager
2. Forum Manager
3. Settings; and
4. Permissions

Unlike some other forum products, when you first install CF you will need to do some preparation before you can post your first forum messages.  Perhaps it might benefit first-time users if the forum was setup “ready to go” without having to read a manual.  That’s something the developers might consider for the future.  Unfortunately, there is limited documentation—more about this later—accompanying the product and so it’s worth making a couple of points.

A beginner’s guide to setting up Chronoforums

The first thing to know about CF is how posts are organised—this is illustrated in the image on the right.  Posts are organised within topics, topics are organised within “forums” and “forums” are grouped within categories.  Another way of saying this is

Categories → Forums → Topics → Posts

Therefore, before you can post to CF you need to define [at least one] category using the Category Manager.  Use the Forum Manager to create [at least one] place where people can create topics.  The terminology may be a little unfamiliar for people who are used to other products but the principles are similar.

After creating your categories and “forums”, you can then use the Settings and Permissions Manager to define global characteristics that control the product.  The Category Manager and Forum Manager allow you to override some of the global permissions if you want to define a more granular level of security.  It is worth reading the unofficial guide written by a user of Chronoforums.

Setup time will obviously vary but you should probably set aside a couple of hours.  Practise with a few test posts and experiment with the various control settings to adapt the product to your needs.

The best bonus feature is the built-in migration from phpBB and Kunena!

Functionality / features

Nearly all web-based discussion forums rely on some form of markup language commonly referred to as BBcode.  CF has its own proprietary BBcode.  Posts can be created using either a BBcode editor or a WYSYWG editor.  There are some slight differences between the two editors.  The choice of editor is determined in the product Settings by the site administrator.

BBcode

Most of the commonly used BBcode tags are implemented (e.g. [b] … [/b], [i] … [/i] , [url] … [/url], [quote] … [/quote], etc.) but it would be nice, perhaps, if there was support for tables (i.e. [table][tr][td] … [/td][/tr][/table]).  The developers may give some thought to extending the range of BBcode tags in a future version.

The [confidential] tag is implemented in CF as [private] to allow sensitive information to be exchanged between forum users and forum moderators.  There does not seem to be support for strikethrough text, videos or some other features that found in other products.

General features

There are a few built-in counter-spam options available (e.g. anti-flooding, CAPTCHA, message approval, auto topic lock, user banning) in CF.  I am not a big believer in built-in counter-spam mechnisms in web-based discussion forums and there are better ways of controlling spam, in my opinion.

There are also a couple of built-in bonus features in CF that are not available elsewhere (e.g. private messaging, reply by email, and “auto reply”) but I have no use for those functions and I have not tested them.  Users can also tag topics on-the-fly, to help people more easily locate subjects of importance.

The usual standard forum features exist to facilitate discussions and engage your community, among them are topic subscriptions, moderator tools to edit, delete, move and split topics, lock topics and create forum announcements.  There is a user “reputation” system—the ability lower a member’s reputation can be disabled—as well as a “vote for the best answer” function that allows topics to be marked as “solved”.

The user profiling part of CF is adequate but does not really allow forum members a lot of scope to inform other users about who they are and what they do.

Forum access is completely controlled by Joomla ACL; in other words, there is no role-based permissions mechanism (e.g. permissions calculated on the basis of forum participation or “rank”).  Using Joomla ACLs it is therefore possible to enable a “teaser” functionality without having to hack the code.

Suggestions for improvement

Everyone has their own wish list of desirable features.  Two areas that stand out to me are

1. no RSS feed capability;
2. no threaded discussion capability—forum replies are always added to the end of the topic.

Look and feel

The overall look and feel is quite impressive for a lightweight[2] forum package.  On the downside, there is only one forum theme/template currently available and the responsive form of this theme is a little clunky but the forum scales “well enough”, I guess.  On the upside, the prosilver theme adapts nicely to Joomla Bootstrap templates and, with a bit of customised CSS and patience, these minor inconveniences can be addressed.

The forum controls—breadcrumbs, buttons, etc.—are organised fairly well.  I have a couple of minor irritations navigating around the forum but people will probably get used to those in time.  From an accessibility perspective, even though some of the button glyphs/icons may not be completely intuitive, most of the web elements have tooltips to indicate their purpose and function.

Reliability

This is an easy one:  the product works!  I have not [yet] discovered any critical errors—HTTP 500 Internal Server Errors, for example—or random, unexpected or unpredictable behaviour.  I can’t give CF a “perfect” 5 out of 5 because I have not tested all the features available in the product.  It is possible that some of the features do not work as claimed or that there are “known” problems” of which I am unaware.

Documentation

This is the weakest area of CF.  I cannot find any official documentation for the product and that, in itself, is a little unsettling.  It is an unfortunately far too common occurrence that software developers do not write (and maintain) documentation for the people who are going to use their products.  People may say that user documentation is unimportant for the ultimate end-user—the members of your website—if the user interface is intuitive.  As I mentioned earlier, there are tooltips associated with the web elements that assist people find their way around the forum.

The real problem is with the administration of the product.  There are more than 150 separately configurable items in the backend and none of them have any tooltips, most of them have no information that explains what happens when the setting is changed, and some of the initial default settings should be changed.  If it were not for the unofficial guide that I referred to earlier, I would have scored this item 0 out of 5.

The absence of documentation is not a show-stopper but it’s a definite area that should be improved.

Internal software design

I mentioned in my earlier article that Chronoforums is not built on Joomla’s MVC architecture for extension design.  Joomla developed an MVC “standard” for extension developers around the time of J! 1.6.  Although this may seem extraordinirly technical to the average website owner, the absence of an MVC structure makes it rather difficult to implement Joomla extension overrides if you need to adapt CF to a given locality.  For example, the date-time [PHP] format in CF is

D M j, Y, g:i a  (example: Monday Oct 9, 2015 9:15 am)

This format is usual for the United States of America and about 3 other countries in the world.  In order to change this format to something else, such as d-M-Y H:i a  (example: 09-Oct-2015 09:15), it is necessary to edit the file ../components/com_chronoforums/locales/<locale-name>/lang.php.  If Chronoforums had been constructed using Joomla’s MVC and if the language had been codified as a .ini file, then changing these formats could easily effected with a language override instead of having to hack the source code (and remembering to redo the hacks if/when a new version of the product is installed in future).

Another example where the design of Chronoforums would be improved, is establishing different menu views of the forum.  With the current non-MVC design, there is only one view available.  The different forum views (“Unanswered”, “New”, “Active”, “Featured”) are implemented with a proprietary menu system.  It is not possible to, say, rearrange the order of these menu items without hacking the source code.  It might be better if CF used Joomla menu system.

People should not interpret my poor rating to imply that the software is badly designed; what I am trying to say is that the software could be a lot better designed if the developers used best-practice structured programming methodologies.  The important thing is that the software works.  Whether the internal design can withstand the pressures of everyday use is something that may be a consideration for the future.

The low-rating on software design is not a show-stopper but it’s a definite area that should be improved.

Support

Even with the best of intentions, the optimum program design, comprehensive documentation and rock-solid reliability, people are bound to ask questions and the developer’s true merit can be seen by the way he, she or they reply to questions on their own support forum.  I have not had a great need to ask too many questions of CF’s support team but, from what I have observed, the support team could improve the quality and timeliness of their responses.  I know what it’s like being a support person—it’s a thankless task—but the most critical factor in providing support is to exhibit empathy with the poor noob who doesn’t know what to say or speak the same language as you do.

I understand, too, that the people who provide support for Chronoforums are not being paid for the questions they answer.  Considering that there’s a good chance the person asking the question is not going to like the answer and you’re not being paid for the answer you’re about to give, answers tend to be reduced to short, vague, jargon-riddled single sentences. I spent a few hours looking at the forum at the developer’s website.  I freely admit that I did not understand 75% of the answers given to people who asked their questions.

While the forum at the developer’s website seems inactive—this may indicate that people do not have a need to ask questions because there are no issues to discuss—the developer’s responses were positive and attempted to be helpful.  I did not read any complaints from people writing in to the CF forum.  I got the impression that the developer genuinely wants to keep the customers happy, fix problems as they’re reported, and implement new features where there’s was some mutual benefit to the business.

Support could be better—it’s barely adequate but it also may be too early for me to judge.

Overall score

It is a matter of opinion whether Chronoforums passes the overall acceptance test.  I am unable to highly rate the product highly at this time but it’s probably the best of its kind that is a “native” Joomla extension for forum activities.  I am comfortable using Chronoforums for my needs for the present time and happy to recommend it as a possible alternative to other forum products currently available.

Notes:

[1]  One measure of “popularity” is to use Google to search for terms relating to specific Joomla extensions:

1. Kunena:  1,110,000 results
2. Chronoforums:  250,000 results
3. EasyDiscuss:  117,000 results
4. Agora Pro:  106,000 results
5. CjForum:  3,000 results

[2]  The entire Chronoforums installation kit is 1.44 Mbytes.  The lastest version of Kunena, by comparison, is 2.11 Mbytes.  Depending on the webhosting provider, some people may experience difficulties installing a Joomla extension that exceeds 2.0 Mbytes and, for this reason, a “lightweight” forum product may better suit their needs.

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.