| Upgrading to Kunena |
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| Sunday, 15 March 2009 00:00 |
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I sat down the other day expecting this migration to take about 2-4 hours to complete accounting for research time and general check-list double checking. It did take a few minutes to read over the documentation in the Kunena Wiki and as usual, I read over their forum and the JED comments looking for potential problems. I really didn't find a lot. Mostly the expected questions concerning replacement modules and plug-ins. So, I backed up my site first and forum database tables seperately and commenced to follow the directions. To my delight, 5 minutes later, it was done. Very simple and the upgrade tool in the installer took care of all my posts without issue. I looked through all of the settings for the forum and most of settings were spot on. The exceptions were with the custom template I WAS using and with linking to Community Builder. Both were reset back to default values. I expected this for the template but not for community builder. I attempted to reinstall my custom template - knowing that it would not likely work - and sure enough it did not. I had been beta testing for the Fireboard community when they were preparing for Joomla 1.5 and knew that they were making changes that would kill my template. I could live with this. Community Builder was a bit more puzzling. Kunena dropped my integration settings on my production site when it had not on other testing environments. I was able to reset these settings and it worked fine, however. I had read that others had experienced this and since there were no significant issues, I didn't choose to investigate it. Modules and Plugins I had been using mod_fblatest for an updated listing of the latest forum posts and mos_fb_discuss for appending direct forum commenting to my article information. I had also incorporated mos_fbsearch for Joomla searching of the forum. None of these worked with the new database structure of Kunena - as expected. I did some digging before upgrading to find out if these had been migrated as well. At the time of this writing, the module was migrated but I could not find an updated discuss bot. I had grown tired with the discuss bot so I decided that I would move to JomComment for this functionality anyway. The search plug-in was very important to me and took a lot of digging initially to find. Both the search plug-in and latest posts module were simply installed in the place of the older extensions. Links to both of these can be found below. Inital Impressions Overall I am quite happy with the upgrade. It was simple, true, but I was also happy with the stability and increased usability of the new interface. While most items were not changed much, there have always been little issues with the administration interface of fireboard that either didn't work or didn't work very well. I have been testing for 3 days and have not found any broken links or missing commands yet. I am concerned with their templating system and their integration with CB at this point. Creating templates at this point is a bit less tedious than it was in the Fireboard days, but they still don't have a good separation between style and data yet. Supposedly, this is slated for the next release (1.6) but there is limited information at this point. As for CB integration, there is really no difference between Fireboard and Kunena, once again new functionality is on the drawing board. There is promising news from joomlapolis.com that the upcoming update to CB1.2 will include some enhancements to integration to Kunena. Time will tell. References and associated links: |
I wrote a couple of weeks ago that I would be upgrading my personal site forum from Fireboard to Kunena. Well I did it and it was fairly painless save one issue. While I am very pleased with the overall changes made to this very useful and powerful FREE forum extension, it still has a long way to go.