The Kunena project is on the verge of collapse amid growing fears that its next version [K 3.1] will ever see the light of day. The survival of Kunena hinges on the success of K 3.1 as much as it does on the future of Joomla.

Over the past couple of years there has been a dramatic decline in the number and availability of free third party-developed extensions for Joomla. The “core applications” within Joomla have also been whittled down to the bare minimum: the ability to register new accounts and login to a website, the ability for people to compose and publish articles on the internet and the means for website operators to allow their users to navigate their sites with a menu system. These are the core elements in any website.

Additional features, such as being able to conduct opinion polls (removed in J! 1.6), submit links to other websites (targeted for J! 3.4) or news feeds, banners, contacts and site searching (to be targeted in J! 3.5), are not seen as part of the core requirements that the Joomla CMS and/or framework developers should have to contend with.

As more features have been and will be removed from the Joomla core and effectively outsourced to third-party developers, third-party developers are have become increasingly reluctant to provide these solutions for free. The days of building extensions for free are numbered.

Third party developers, faced with the inevitable likelihood that the hundreds or thousands of hours of their time will go unrewarded, are losing interest in providing extensions for free. The same thing holds true for the Kunena project.

Against this background of declining interest in “doing it for nothing”, the Kunena project has suffered. The Kunena developers have lost the incentive to enhance the forum product so that it continues to meet the ever-present demands for new features while, at the same time, ensuring that Kunena will continue to operate as a part of Joomla.

This article explains the difference between a Joomla site template and a Kunena component template.

When you install Kunena for the first time it comes with a built-in template called Blue Eagle[1]. Blue Eagle is not a Joomla site template; it is a template designed for Kunena. The files in Blue Eagle are updated and replaced automatically when you upgrade from one version of Kunena to a later version.

Many people want to customise Kunena to better suit their Joomla site; however, if they change the original source code in Blue Eagle those changes are lost when they upgrade to a newer version of Kunena. There are several ways that you can customise the way that Kunena looks on your website. These involve adding your own CSS rules to your Joomla site template or use a custom Kunena template so that, when new releases of Kunena become available, you can upgrade without losing your custom changes.

Based on my own experience using Kunena over many years, this article discusses some of these custom template issues.

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve read the phrase in a support forum, “I have the same problem …”, I would be rich beyond my wildest dreams!

Automatic subscriptions—the ability to enforce a website owner’s policy that all members of the site “automatically” receive email notifications whenever there is some new forum activity (a new topic created or replies made to existing topics)—is a subject that has been discussed going back as far as I can remember. People have asked for the Kunena project team to deliver features that allow them to “autosubscribe” members of their forums to categories and topics without their members having to do anything except to join their websites. This is a subject that has as many different views about how to implement a solution as well as different opinions about whether such methods are ethical, “legitimate”, workable, worthy or legal in terms of the protection of an individual’s right to privacy or an individual’s right to choose.

The different views and opinions expressed by the wider Kunena community exist within the Kunena project team, too. In short, there is no simple answer to this very complex issue.