Quick reference
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.
User Rating: 5 / 5
Installation / intial setup
Functionality / features
Look and feel
Reliability
Documentation
Internal software design
Support
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.
User Rating: 4 / 5
Measuring customer satisfaction about Kunena
Questions we need to ask
Opinions matter. In today’s poll-driven world public opinion decides the fate of governments, business success and little “successes” (and “failures”) like which movies you watch, the restaurants where you dine and even what brand of toothpaste you buy. All opinions are personal and subjective; everyone has a different opinion about what they like and dislike. In the end, we are totally responsible for choosing how we think and act: we cannot blame someone else because we followed their example.
In today’s world—where opinions become the news—is it any wonder that governments want to know what voters think, that manufacturers and suppliers want to know how consumers rate their products and services, what your friends, colleagues and family think of your views?
This article discusses our current perceptions about Kunena and, just as importantly, whether the Kunena developers care what we think.
I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.Evelyn Beatrice Hall, The Friends of Voltaire, 1906
User Rating: 3 / 5
The Kunena Blue Eagle menu
The “nav pill” menu
There must be literally thousands of different ways that site owners handle user navigation around their websites; people probably spend countless hours (and sometimes a lot of money) searching for that “ideal” menu that highlights and facilitates access to the site’s content. There are an unlimited number of menu modules one can obtain for Joomla; some menus are included when you obtain a Joomla template and others can be installed separately. The choice is limited only by one's imagination.
The whole point of having a menu is to make it easy for people to find what they’re seeking or to display what area of the site that they’ve found. Whatever menu system you choose, it’s probably a good idea to keep it simple!
This article demonstrates how, with a few lines of CSS, you can transform the “standard” menu in the Blue Eagle template for Kunena from its “tabbed” appearance into a Bootstrap-like “nav pills” design without installing a Bootstrap-compatible Joomla template or an additional Joomla menu module.
What is “special” about Blue Eagle
Where did those rounded corners come from?
Remove the borders between forum elements
The Kunena Blue Eagle template has been around for a long time—over 6 years since it was first designed for K 1.6—and it is the basis for 95% of the hundreds of thousands of Joomla websites around the world that use the Kunena forum product. As you can imagine, there have been a lot of changes in the last 6 years. Apart from thirty-plus releases of Kunena there have been changes in web-browser technology, HTML, CSS and generally in the way people prefer to view web content (desktop computers, laptops, tablets and mobile phones). It is not surprising that the Kunena Blue Eagle template developed 6 years ago (and that has largely remained unchanged over this time) is showing its age.
In the years that the author has been associated with Kunena we must have answered thousands—possibly tens of thousands—of questions about how to change bits and pieces of the standard Kunena template. This article will demonstrate a couple of changes that you can make to give your forum template a simple, modern and more elegant look.
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