What is Kunena?

Kunena is a forum component for Joomla. Integrating a forum into Joomla has always been possible but was never very easy, often involving the use of bridge extensions to connect Joomla to well-established, free-standing web-based forum products.

Name

The name Kunena is from a Swahili word meaning, “to speak”. It was derived from the former Fireboard forum with new and previous developers that include several Joomla core developers. The developers have a long term goal to redesign Kunena from the ground up to take full advantage of what Joomla has to offer.

Everyone who contributes to Kunena is a hobbyist, enthusiast or professional web developer who gives their time freely to this project - volunteers every one of us. Our hope is to make Kunena the most reliable, scalable, durable and robust forum component for Joomla that we can make it and to give people the best solution to meeting their forum needs. The forum is a self-help community-driven resource for users to help one another. Our job, in moderating the forum, is not necessarily to answer every question but, rather, to point people in the right direction where they can find the answers.

Kunena is a registered trademark.

History

Kunena was first released as K 1.0.6 on 10 January 2009. At that time Fireboard had become more closed to the public with many locked forum categories. The development team realised that a new strategic direction was required to address the growing concerns that the Fireboard community had with the reliability and the security of that product and, particularly, to encourage a greater participation between the development team and the user community.

Fireboard became obsolete with the release of FB 1.0.5 RC2 on 27 October 2008. Fireboard was the merge of two earlier products: Joomlaboard and Mamboboard. Although these products are no longer available to the general public - there are still many websites that continue to use this product and there are still some similarities to Kunena in the ways that they work. In December 2008 the Fireboard team decided to close their related discussion forum in the wake of mounting criticism from people who were unwilling to wait for a so-called final/stable release of Fireboard.

The simplest way to navigate the documentation is to use the Next and Previous arrows on each page. You can see your progress represented check marks in the sidebar.