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.

Running a PC-hosted website and trying to diagnose problems that people might have with Kunena are always difficult. They’re difficult because no-one else can actually see the problems first-hand.

Running XAMPP on a Windows 7 64-bit system (for example) is particularly troublesome.  XAMPP or WAMP don’t like to work on 64-bit Windows systems.  This is the main reason that I abandoned my web development on Windows 7 (64-bit) but I occasionally do some experimentation in Windows 7 (32-bit). The bigger problem that I have—and still not fully resolved—concerns the Windows firewall which makes it virtually impossible—the response times are far too long—trying to access web pages across a Windows-based LAN.  Perhaps these issues don’t occur with UNIX-based servers but I really don’t have the time, energy or motivation to set up a webhosting environment on my LAN.

The problems don’t end there, either, and some problems may be unusual because different versions of this kind of software install unusual implementations of PHP—unusual in the sense that real web-hosted solutions don’t run into those issues.