One of the current problems with the Kunena website is that the documentation is out of date and no-one is maintaining it properly.  This article is part of an ongoing series to update the information so that it is more relevant to Kunena today.

When you first install Kunena on your Joomla site, a help menu item is created for you but its contents are not very useful (see the image on the right); many people choose to hide or remove this menu item completely.  The menu item is more of a “template” for a help page indicating that there are several ways to build your real page but it is up to you to write your own text if that will eventually appear on the Help tab.

The help page can be anything you want.  It can be used, for example, to show your community how to use the forum, what is allowed and what isn’t allowed and to educate your users about the features of Kunena and how use them.  I wrote a sample forum help page for Kunena several years ago but it contains errors and it is sorely in need of a major rewrite.

The help page is built using the Kunena custom content menu type.  Menu items using this menu type can be used for more than only providing a help guide for your users. They can be renamed or used for any purpose that helps your community and you can also build other pages using the techniques we will describe below.

Category icons have been a feature of Kunena from the very beginning[1].  These icons serve as a two-state indicator[2] on category indexes to show

(a) for a logged-in user[3] , if any categories displayed on the index have unread posts;
(b) if there are categories on the index that have no new posts.

This article discusses how to customise category icon images for your Kunena forum.

A client asked me today “What, in your opinion, is the best forum product?”  Without hesitation I replied, “Kunena is the ‘only’ forum product for Joomla!”  Of course there are other forum products—there are other forum products for Joomla—but Kunena is the only product that I can recommend with total con­fi­dence.  The announcement in April this year about K 4.0 beta was good news.  It has taken the Kunena team more than 2 years to now be in a position to offer a version of the next generation of Kunena for the community to test.  How has the com­munity responded and how will the com­munity judge this next, new version that has taken so long to produce?  Only time will tell, of course.

The article about K 4.0 beta was well-written and I congratulate its author, Florian Dal Fitto, for taking charge of the marketing side of things.  K 4.0 still only exists as a beta version—and there is no shame in acknow­ledging that all beta software contains defects (even lots of defects).  Given the deepening mystery surrounding the project and the information vacuum that we’ve had for months, I was very pleased that Florian’s article contained more information (including some screenshots) about the team’s plans over the coming weeks.  Leaving aside the fact that the K 4.0 beta versions that have been released to date did (and still do) contain a lot of errors—we should not punish the team for those faults—overall the whole K 4.0 story has been a disappointing one and, I am sorry to say, it still disappoints me.

I’ve recently installed Kunena on my website and love its functionality. The only problem is I’m getting spam and it’s getting worse.  Are there recommendations or some sort of cheat sheet to follow to stop these bad guys/robots?a “forum user”, Kunena forum, 3 May 2015

The problem with spam is not confined to Kunena.  Indeed, the discussion about forum spam has been going on long before Kunena (or Joomla) first appeared.  People can spend almost as much time researching the subject as they may have to spend dealing with an outbreak of spam in their forums. The short answer to the question “How can I stop forum spam [in Kunena]?” is that you cannot.  You can never completely eradicate spam—there is no 100% guaranteed solution to combat spam.  Kunena does have some configuration settings that will help you to manage the amount of spam that you may get but those configuration settings, by themselves, will not completely innoculate you against the spam epidemic.  This article is therefore only a guide—a collection of some ideas that I have found useful—in minimising the level of spam in your forum.

One of the most commonly asked questions among users of Kunena (and the same thing is true for any Joomla extension) is “Which CSS file should I change …” (for all kinds of reasons).  This question has been “answered” in variously different ways—some good and some bad—including recommending that people directly edit the file kunena.forum.css (or, worse, the file kunena.forum-min.css).  This is actually very bad advice—and that’s not just my personal opinion!

Never directly edit or replace the original Kunena template source files including the .CSS files! Any changes you make will be overwritten when you upgrade or re-install Kunena.

Aside from the fact that Kunena installs its own CSS files (and minified versions of them) and apart from the fact that you can edit these files (if you really have the enthusiasm to wade through pages of not-very-well documented code) any changes that you make to these files will be lost when you install a new version of Kunena or re-install (or downgrade from) the version that you are currently using.