Every website is a business in some form or another[1] and how you manage your website determines the success or otherwise of your business.  If you spend time cultivating your website, investing in developing new content, new software and general maintenance, your customers—the people who visit your site—will notice the difference and will return again.  If you treat your site like a “field of dreams”—if you expect your business to flourish simply because you created a website (and that was the total extent of your time and energy)—then you’re in for a wake-up call.

Every website is a business in some form or another and the first order of business is to cover your operating expenses.  You can (a) charge people to pay to view your site, (b) encourage people to donate their time and/or money to help with your running costs and/or (c) obtain revenue via in-site advertising.  The success of your business depends on how well others enjoy doing business with you, whether they’ll visit your site, buy your products or refer others to your site and do the same and, hopefully, give you some profit at the end of the day.  This website is no different.  There are a couple of advertisements that appear on the pages—I certainly appreciate the tiny click-rate revenue they give me—but, I hope, they’re not too invasive.  How a site owner designs their site and runs their business is entirely up to them, of course; I’m not suggesting otherwise.

There are three kinds of people in this world:  those who make things happen, those who watch things happen and those who wonder what happened.  The success of your business is in your hands and is dependent on the kind of person you are.  Are you an entrepreneur, a passive observer or a victim of circumstances?

The one constant we can rely upon is that everything changes and, depending on the type of person you are, people manufacture a variety of excuses to rationalise why they’re unable to deal with inevitable change—the blame game.  This article will help you identify whether you’re at risk of playing the blame game and how to rid yourself from the burden of using outdated, unsupported and vulnerable software.

Some people may be curious about the title I’ve chosen for this article.  Before people become concerned about my state of mind—am I really not going to write about Kunena anymore or is this the end of my {kun´ēzē} business—I have a few words to say about recent changes in this popular Joomla extension.  There are a couple of hidden surprises in the latest versions of Kunena that may make you think twice about wanting to install them.

At the outset, you do not need to be alarmed or feel nervous that the latest version will make your websites any more vulnerable than what they currently are.  The changes in Kunena version 4.0.12 [K 4.0.12] and 5.0.2 [K 5.0.2] will not make websites any more or less secure than the previous releases.  There have been a couple of minor technical improvements—those are the facts—but there have also been changes that may upset some people:  one change, in particular, that challenges the reasons people choose Kunena in the first place!  The good news is that the “last word” in this article will help reduce those fears.

I’m a pretty upbeat kind of guy and I’ve been a happy and (I hope) helpful contributor to the Kunena project since I began my involvement with it in 2009.  Kunena (actually it was its predecessor, Fireboard) was one of the main reasons that I adopted Joomla.  The original project had some wonderful guys and I had the immense privilege of meeting them and becoming friends with them.  I mention them by name:  Oliver Ratzesberger, Ron Severdia (a former member of the PLT), Louis Landry (one of the founders of Joomla who undertook the fork from Fireboard) and Matias Griese; all of these people are well-known and widely respected within the Joomla community.

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!”