I agree with others that this is the best forum for Joomla. And I agree that version 1.6 has lots of very nice improvements, such as automatic resizing of images when users upload. Kunena is a significant forum system that deserves respect and support.
However... I am surprised at all the glowing reviews because there are some problems yet with this new version. If you have a restricted or private forum for registered users only, then bad things can happen.
1. Category setup. If you have a restricted or private forum, Administrators cannot access the forum at all unless you ALSO specify the backend access. I fiddled with that a lot until I was able to get it to work. Not only do you have to specify who gets access but you MUST appoint moderators for that forum (including yourself) or nobody with an Admin ranking will be able to get in. ALSO... remember to publish the SECTIONS as well as the categories. I got so twangled up in forum settings that somehow the sections got turned off. (It's easy to get twangled when things aren't going right.)
2. When you're done setting up a new component, the last thing you do is make a MENU item link, right?? Oh, this was worst nightmare I've had in months. If you have a private forum, the MENU links won't work! I read everything in the Kunena forum, I followed all instructions and I spent 6 or 7 hours simply trying to create a menu link that didn't generate error messages. Apparently Kunena's router needs some tweaking? I don't know what's wrong but IMO, this problem should have been fixed during the BETA testing stage.
I believe this is what you must do to create a menu link that doesn't generate errors:
a. Make sure your Joomla is UP TO DATE and create a NEW Joomla menu. Create an entirely new JOOMLA menu (not a third party menu.) Don't use your old Joomla menus, make a new one. (You can copy links over to the new one.) But you need to create an all-new Kunena link, keep reading...
b. Go into the Kunena configuration and go to the CONTROL PANEL. Select the icon that says CREATE MENU. This will generate a menu link that works. You may have to search through all your menus to FIND the link that Kunena just made. It doesn't matter where it lands, you can move it to the menu you want.
c. If you have other forum links with the same unique id name, there might be conflicts. Since Kunena generates a FORUM link with the unique name of forum (which is not very unique), you may want to change it's name to something much more original. Or delete other links which have the unique name so there's no confusion.
d. It might be necessary to use entirely NEW sections and entirely NEW categories in order to discard old kunena code. I'm not entirely sure if this is right, but 7 hours of trying to create a menu link; I discarded everything that was from Kunena 1.5 in case legacy code was the problem. Some of the error messages did indicate that legacy code was the culprit. (But we all know that error messages usually have nothing to do with the real error.)
If you're successful in generating a forum menu link that works without errors, don't change it and don't touch it. If you want to try to tweak your Menu link, make a copy and adjust that instead. I found that no kind of tweaking worked no-how.
ANOTHER BIG PROBLEM: you can't link to a specific Category or Forum directly. This is a real pain because we only use one category for my Forum, but we can't make a menu link for it; not without breaking the router.
SO, I created a hard-coded link at the top of my HOME page that goes directly to the category I want, and it works without errors. But I can't set up a Joomla menu item for that category and as a result, I can't set the forum as my DEFAULT home page either, even though it's the main purpose for our family website.
I really hope the Kunena developers address this issue soon because I'm not the only one who's had major frustrations with simply making a Menu link. It shouldn't be this hard, it really shouldn't.
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