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.

Imagine that you have decided to invite your family or friends to a restaurant: you’re not trying to impress anyone; you just want to enjoy a relaxing meal out.  You do the necessary preparations—book the restaurant, get a couple of bottles of your favourite wine from home—arrive and you’re seated at the table.  The waiter hands out the dinner menus and talks about the “specials”.  You and your guests decide to order the special meals and open your wine.  After a couple of hours, you’ve eaten the bread, the bottles of wine are empty but the meal still hasn’t arrived.  You start to get a little nervous (and impatient) because you and your guests haven’t eaten.

You call the waiter’s attention to your agitated state and and your growing concerns for you and your guests (even though other patrons at the restaurant seem to be enjoying “standard menu” meals).  The waiter smiles disingenuously and you hear something like “chef is just putting the final touches on your meals” and that you will be served “soon”.  Perhaps the alcohol has affected your judgement but with some reluctance you decide to accept the waiter’s explanation, remain seated at the table getting hungrier (and more impatient) as the night wears on.  What started out as a pleasant evening is soon turning into a nightmare.

Does this sound familiar?  Even if you haven’t experienced this, your appetite would have been ruined not to mention your embarrassment and reputation as an epicure.

After waiting more than 6 months for news about a possible release of K 3.0.7, an announce­ment was made on 1 February at the Kunena website.  It is not suprising that this announcement did not generate a scramble to download this latest version because people would have to be regular visitors at the Kunena website to have been aware of it.  If you follow the project on Facebook, there was no announcement made there.  If you follow the project on Google+ there is no announcement about K 3.0.7 there, either.  If you use Twitter to find out the latest news about Kunena, the developers did not make any announcement about K 3.0.7 there, as well.  In fact, the first “tweet” about K 3.0.7 was made by someone who is not even a member of the Kunena team and it appeared nearly three weeks after K 3.0.7 was released.

This raises some concerns about how the Kunena team is looking after their own interests in keeping the community informed about what is going on.  If it wasn’t for independent websites, like this one and others, people probably would not know what is going on.

Happy New Year to all my readers. I hope that 2015, as far as Kunena is concerned, will start on a happier note than the situation as we saw at the end of 2014. Since the release of K 3.0.6 in July last year, there has been very little news about Kunena from the development team prompting a number of questions to be asked on the Kunena forum about what is happening and whether the project is still “alive”. Fortunately, for all of us who have been using Kunena for a number of years, it appears that a new release [K 3.0.7] is expected soon! This is good news after waiting six months for some relief concerning many problems that have been reported over that time.

Although the release of K 3.0.7 is long overdue, this news could not come at a better time because K 3.0.7 will be needed by people who adopt J! 3.4 when the new version of Joomla is released (rumoured to be in a couple of weeks' time). Put another way, when J! 3.4 is released, the current stable release of Kunena will not install on Joomla 3.4.

Correction
Based on new information, I need to correct information about K 3.0.6 that I previously believed to be correct. I have been assured by one of the Kunena developers that K 3.0.6 will install on J! 3.4. I hope this new information lessens any concerns people may have about the future of Kunena and Joomla. The real test, of course, will be when J! 3.4 is released as a stable version.

For those who are interested in K 3.0.7, please read on.

As we come to the end of what has been a disappointing year for the Kunena project, I have been trying to think of a few positive things to write. Kunena is more than just an open-source, web-based discussion forum product that people can download and install at no cost: it is something I am particularly fond of; I would regret seeing its development end and thousands of hours of work become an historical footnote. The sad truth is that the Kunena project has been suffering for far too long and a top-level management restructure is long overdue.

Kunena has enjoyed considerable success over the last six years, rising to become one of the popular extensions used with Joomla. However, while Kunena has been successful in the past, its future is unclear. For over six months there have been no reliable or regular information updates from the Kunena developers. People can draw their own conclusions about this information vacuum but I believe the main reason is the failure of project management at the top. Strategically, Kunena has failed as a project because of the overall inefficiency in its current management: there is no coherent plan or timetable, publicity or marketing narrative to encourage users that a future version (or versions) of Kunena can reasonably be expected.

Of course it troubles me to publicly state my conclusions because of my fondness for Kunena and out of respect for the people with whom I have worked for nearly six years. However, when there are more than just murmurs of discontent within the Kunena community, and when I am frequently asked what I know about the state of the project, perhaps it's time to openly discuss what has gone wrong and how we may be able to fix things … if indeed there's anyone else who feels, as I do, that things can be fixed.