Kunena 1.6 vs PHPBB3 (w Rocketbridge) for large community
-
-
- cxm
- Hero Rocketeer
- Posts: 300
- Thanks: 0
-
What say you what say you RT gods? Now, I want to first discuss the obvious conflict of interest here. You guys make money off of charging for the PHPBB3 club so I don't know how objective this can be.
With that said will you and other community members give a real honest sentiment about the new Kunena 1.60b or 1.6 and if you feel that it is a better fit for our joomla sites and RT templates than phpBB3?
I have used phpBB3 in the past and it is a great thing but the obvious integration is why I think anyone would want to go with Kunena over it.
With that said I also feel that if you guys (RT) would charge for forum access, lets say 25 bucks a year or something, I wouldn't mind paying that to come here and get great advice and know that I will have support on my RT theme versus just paying 50 bucks and doing an integration bridge rather than getting a product through Kunena which I actually might want visa this new upgrade?
any feedback would be much appreciated.
a lot of the forum stuff on google is old because the new Kunena seems to address a lot of peoples complaints and concerns.
-
-
-
- Kat05
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 25898
- Thanks: 334
-
hi there,
kunena is a joomla forum extension, phpbb3 is a completely different platform than joomla and can be used independently. (without joomla).
the rockettheme.com site itself is a joomla website, the forum area uses phpbb3 bridged with rokbridge. and yes, besides the joomla, drupal and wordpress club, we have a separate phpbb3 club. but this does not mean that we are suggesting it over joomla forum extensions such as kunena.
it is not up to rockettheme to decide which solution will fit better for anyone's site (kunena or phpbb3 bridged with rokbridge), this really depends on yourself, what kind of site you are running and what features and possibilities you are looking for in a forum. there are many users who use phpbb3 without joomla as they may need a forum-driven site only and not any combination with a content management system such as joomla.
we know that kunena is a very popular joomla forum extension and if any rockettheme member uses kunena on his rockettheme site and experiences issues in functionality or compatibility which are caused by the template configuration or any of our extensions, we are happy to try and help out and make things work. for this very reason we have kunena 1.5 and 1.6 installs for testing purposes to be able to help out with some issues that rockettheme members may have with kunena.
recently, i have joined the kunena forum and i am checking every now and then if any issues are mentioned there in order for us to provide better help. the moderators over there are aware that we are keen to make things work without any issues.
hope this answers your question.
- Kat05 / QA Lead & Support / Germany
-
-
-
- Darklorden
- Newbie
- Posts: 5
- Thanks: 0
-
I too am a former phpbb3 user but have now moved over to kunena. My reasoning is that kunena is integrated while phpbb3 is a standalone thus forced to rely on a bridge to keep the communication going between Joomla and phpbb3. Although the bridges are evolving they still wont work as smooth as a integrated forum extensions.
I believe that Kunena will be a contender to phpbb3, and perhaps not only that but all standalone forums out there. If you ever deem K. big enough to build templates for I most probably will subscribe.
-
-
-
- JT Bowlin
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 197
- Thanks: 0
-
FYI- Kunena 1.6 RC1 was released yesterday! I really hope to see RocketTheme add support for it. There's a bit in the update news about centralized themes that makes it sound promising (see below in red). The blog post is pasted below:
---
From: http://www.kunena.com/blog/19-developer-blog/62-kunena-16-rc-1-released
Kunena 1.6 RC 1 Released!
Introduction
The Kunena Team is excited to announce the release of Kunena 1.6, Release Candidate 1. This is the first RC release and is stable enough to be used on live production websites in limited usage (primarily for testing) as long as minor issues are tolerated during the time before it becomes a final release.
Since the first beta release of Kunena 1.6, the Kunena team has been focused on fixing a great number of bugs, CSS fixes, IE7 compatibility issues and adding translations for more languages.
Kunena 1.6 marks a major milestone for the Kunena project. A long list of open source contributors have committed over 2000 changes and have helped make Kunena the leading forum solution for Joomla 1.5 & 1.6. A long list of new features in addition with various optimizations and code restructuring have resulted in the most advanced Kunena version to date.
We continue to put a big emphasis on usability and easy of installation. As such the installer has been further enhanced to allow for multiple install and upgrade options. It performs its steps incrementally to avoid timeouts on slower hosts. It automatically performs actions as e.g. taking the forum offline during the install and re-enables it after completing the install.
Kunena now supports Joomla 1.6 style languages files that are backward compatible with Joomla 1.5. Multiple languages are included in the base install packages and more will be available and can be installed separately. Kunena 1.6 also support multiple languages to be installed on a single system and together with Joomla allows users to select their preferred language.
Templates have now been separated from underlying code and allow for version independent template development. Templates can embed various options that can be set via the included template manager (e.g. Avatar position left-right-top-bottom in the new default template - Blue Eagle).
The Kunena Team is fully committed to Joomla 1.6 and beyond and various modules have been developed to lay the ground work for future releases of Joomla.
What is New?
The new features in Kunena 1.6 include:
Improved Language Support:
* Included languages: Catalan, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Italian, Macedonian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Yugoslavian (more to come)
* Uses standard Joomla 1.6 language files (backwards compatible with Joomla 1.5.x)
* Added support for installable language packs (using the Joomla Installer)
New Kunena Template Manager:
* Centralized template system with installable templates
* New default template Blue Eagle
* Example template included for use as a base when creating new templates
* Template parameters that allow more freedom for template designers and site administrators
* Added support for icon sets allows different button and icon variations
New Integrated Polls Feature:
* Category specific: enable the feature from Category Manager
* Global settings to modify the poll behavior
* Migrate data from the Kunena 1.5 poll hack
Improved Topic and Post Moderation:
* Ability to restore and purge deleted posts with Trash Manager (backend)
* Unapproved or deleted topics and posts can be seen in many views
* Delete, restore and approve posts while reading topic
* Simplified move, merge and split
* Move current or newer posts into another category or (new) topic
New User Moderation Features:
* Users can be banned directly from their profile
* Ban only from the forum (= read only access) or from the entire website
* Ban user for a limited time (ban from the forum only)
* Allow moderators to share ban reasons and to write comments on it
* Ban history and show all previous bans on the user's profile
* List banned users in the Ban Manager on the moderator's profile page
New Posting and End User Features:
* Multiple attachments support (AJAX-based)
* Category subscriptions
* New 'Thank you' system for thanking the poster for their message
* Users can delete their own messages (configurable by time)
* Anonymous Tipping: allow users to post topics in a defined category completely anonymously (no IP, no tracking, totally anonymous)
* Google Maps integration - display basic maps inside of posts
* New BBCode tags likeArticle cannot be shown
-
-
-
- prim
- Preeminent Rocketeer
- Posts: 17290
- Thanks: 217
-
I thought Kunena had a new code base while fireboard is using an old one
- Please reply with a direct link to the issue & create a new thread for each new issue.
A template is only as good as the content that goes into it
- DanG
-
-
-
- LiEs
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 238
- Thanks: 0
-
prim wrote:
I thought Kunena had a new code base while fireboard is using an old oneThat was the closest website example I could come up with. The tables still show fb, then again that is just a name.
-
-
-
- JT Bowlin
- Sr. Rocketeer
- Posts: 197
- Thanks: 0
-
Well I think that's because there's not an awesome themer like RocketTheme supporting it yet. With the user changes in Joomla 1.6, it is a really good fit since no bridge will be required (i.e. phpBB), but you will have good user management.
Here is the main themer so far: http://www.templatekunena.com/
Although they are nowhere near the quality of RocketTheme...
Maybe just include it in Joomla templates as a third party theming. I don't know if it's ready for it's own club yet. I suppose that depends how much work it takes to do the theming. I wouldn't have a clue on that...
-
Time to create page: 0.075 seconds