Thank you for your question. This is such a good subject that I'm making it a sticky topic and I hope that everyone else who has a similar question about why their Joomla template is causing them frustration with
Kunena will read it.
First of all, this forum is about helping people to make
Kunena to work. There are a few million different Joomla templates on the market and their developers have different ideas about how to build templates for Joomla. Some of those ideas are good and some of them are not so good. Our job here is not to fix up the problems, mistakes or errors made by other Joomla developers. Our job is to suggest ways that people can solve their problems for themselves.
Every day we receive a lot of questions about why people's websites don't seem to be functioning well when they use
Kunena. The general answer to this problem is that most people don't spend enough time planning their sites before they install
Kunena. This is summarised in the question
Which came first? The template or the forum?
No one can properly answer that question about which should come first: your Joomla site template or your
Kunena forum. It depends on what is more important to you.
If your Joomla site template is more important to you - and
Kunena doesn't work with it - then you may be wasting your time with
Kunena; find another forum component that works with your template (and we wish you good luck).
Alternatively, you should contact the author of your Joomla site template and explain the problem to them and ask for their help. Any reputable Joomla template developer should provide those kinds of services especially if you purchased a template from them.
Kunena has been tested with the
standard Joomla templates that ship with the Joomla installation package. As far as possible we try to ensure that
Kunena works flawlessly with those templates. In cases where you are using a third-party template (or one of your own design) the cause of most of these issues lies within the choice you made: your Joomla site template is more important; that doesn't mean that
Kunena is defective simply because you're using something that
Kunena has not been tested with.
If your forum is more important to you, then look at what templates work with
Kunena or look at fixing up the problems that you have with your Joomla site template so that everything works together. Sometimes we may have overlooked issues arising from using the standard Joomla templates and we will do everything possible to correct those problems so that other people won't encounter them.
Some people can fix these problems themselves and some people can't. As I wrote before, it's not our job to provide a free service to fix the millions of problems created by other Joomla template developers.
Nearly every problem that we've seen can be fixed
really quickly if people know a few things about web design and about the building blocks of the internet (in particular about CSS). It's not our job to teach those skills. For those who don't want to learn the skills - but who just want the answers - there are thousands of people who make their living out of answering those questions for a price.
If you don't want to pay the price there are three things that you can do:
(1) Try different Joomla site templates until you find one that works for you.
(2) Read the good help that is given on the FAQs page (there's a menu link above this forum) and, in particular, see
Template and layout-related issues
. Learn to use the web developer's tools that are included with (or that can be added on to) your web browsers (e.g see
Firebug
).
(3) While every problem is unique, the approach to asking the question should be the same. If you have a problem with your Joomla template then
please give other people the details about where the problem occurs. A screenshot helps but the URL of your
Kunena forum will help others find and help you faster. We respect your right to privacy. If you don't want to provide that information, that's OK. As I have written many times, every problem is unique and we cannot provide general solutions without knowing what's causing your
specific problem.
There is no company behind
Kunena; 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. This forum {
www.kunena.org
) 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.
I hope that what I've written goes some way towards answering many questions that people may be asking about
Kunena and to help others in the future.