J! 3.6.0 was released about a week ago. If people have enabled the System - Joomla! Update Notification plugin (this was a new feature introduced in J! 3.5) they are probably receiving emails[1] once or twice a day advising them to upgrade to J! 3.6.0. There are three things you can do: you can ignore the emails, disable the plugin, or upgrade.

Since the announcement of J! 3.6.0 the Joomla forum has been filled with stories—mostly tales of woe—about difficulties that people have experienced. Like most people, one reads these stories to gauge the veracity of claims that people have made before taking that giant leap-of-faith and going ahead with the procedure oneself.

There are a couple of known issues but, for the most part, they are relatively insignificant.

I confess that I’m a forum junkie but I get frustrated with requests for help from others with their I-have-a-problem-with-my-Joomla-on-a-PC-hosted-website problems that I encounter on an almost-daily basis.  Discussion forums are great places to obtain assistance or vent one’s personal opinion but, although the more seasoned members of such communities offer their support, assisting people with problems that exist in their own private universe is an incredibly difficult thing to do via a forum.

Wherever I travel—whether my local JUG or attending Joomla events around the country or the world—our community seems to be divided on the necessity of designing, developing, building and testing websites on a PC-hosted platform before deploying it on the “real” server.  I meet people who are more than passionate about their use of PC-hosted sites; they’re almost obsessive-compulsive about it.  Whenever I challenge their beliefs—sometimes bordering on fanaticism—about the requirement to undertake their craft in a one-person “world” (usually one solitary personal computer that’s not networked to others), I’m met with the resolute response, “This is the only way and you can’t tell me otherwise!”

We all make mistakes—tactical decisions which, with the benefit of hindsight, we wish we hadn’t made—but, if we’re honest with ourselves, we try to make the best decisions in the prevailing circumstances.  It may turn out later that the decision was the wrong one but we play the cards we’re dealt or we walk away from the game.  When I wrote my earlier article (A Tale of Two Forums) I had to make a choice:  continue using a forum product that was impossibly stuck in trouble or venture into the great unknown and try something else.

I chose to go with Chronoforums because it seemed like a viable alternative for my needs at the time[1].  I knew the risks, I weighed up the evidence for and against, and I followed my instincts.  A lot has changed with Kunena since I took that decision.  Even though Kunena has changed (and it’s still far from being completely trouble-free) I decided a few days ago to re-install it here.  My journey for the “ideal” forum product is not yet over but I thought I would share some things that I’ve learned in the hope that people reading this will find some usefulness if they’re in a similar situation

Kunena 4.0 is a Joomla 2.5/3.x component that ships with with two different template “styles” technically called MVC and HMVC[1]; these are informally referred to as Blue Eagle and Crypsis respectively.  All currently available third-party templates are based on the “MVC style”. The “MVC style” style is deprecated—meaning that the developers would have preferred to have removed entirely but it was mainly allowed to remain for people who use J! 2.5. The developers will remove support for all MVC templates from the next major version of Kunena [K 5.0].

Aside from the obvious differences in appearance, there are structural differences in the use and administraton of the product depending on the choice of template used with Kunena.  As far as I know, no-one has attempted to list the important differences between the MVC and HMVC forms of Kunena. This article is a first attempt to list the major structural differences between Blue Eagle and Crypsis. The table below is incomplete and it may contain errors.  If you find mistakes or important omissions to the list please let me know by using the comments form at the end of the article.

My last report about Kunena was not favourable; it was written more than six months ago and there have been four releases since then.  It is therefore time to update the report card.  Kunena is a popular[1] forum product for Joomla. Despite the overall declining popularity in internet forums and Joomla in general—and Kunena in particular—it remains one of the most widely-reviewed extensions in the JED.  Perhaps the best example of its use is at the project team’s website[2].

It’s difficult to say how well this product will satisfy your requirements (because everyone is different) but, in general terms, Kunena provides the essential features needed to run a forum.  Generally-speaking, Kunena is fairly intuitive from the end-user perspective and should require little training of your users to make the most of it.