Beginners

From Kunena

Kunena - A basic Overview for Beginners

Kunena is a Joomla native forum component that allows you to quickly deploy a community forum to your Joomla based website. Kunena 1.0 is native to Joomla 1.0.x but will also work great under Joomla 1.5.x. We have taken great care in testing as much as possible on both platforms.

As a component to Joomla, Kunena integrates deeply into the framework of Joomla. User management, Registration, Login/Logout, menus, modules and much more are leveraged through Joomla itself.

Rather than having to write the whole framework, Kunena concentrates on the essentials of a well integrated Forum on top of the leading Content Management Platform available today.

Kunena has been designed to be a simple to use, yet sophisticated CMS based forum platform that grows with your needs. The tight integration with Joomla allows for cross customizations options that no bridged solution can ever offer.

The front end integrates into the Joomla template system and extends it with custom forum templates. Kunena 1.0 by default comes with the default_ex template. It has been evolving over time to a very powerful and flexible template. Most adjustments to its look and feel require no to little coding and can be accomplished by modifying the CSS and image sets provided with the application.

At the point of release of Kunena 1.0, various third party customisations are already available. When searching for them, make sure they are native Kunena 1.0.8 or greater.

There are two portions to the application:

Kunena Frontend

The front-end in Kunena - also the Joomla front-end, is what your regular users will see on a daily basis. It represents the public interface to your community forum.

It leverages the installed templates and settings you choose to present a sophisticated forum solution to your registered users as well as guests. Whether to make a forum public, private, read only and so on - is in your control based on the Joomla and Kunena settings you choose.

You are able to differentiate between registered users, administrators, moderators as well as guests and can customise the experience for them.

Through the use of Joomla modules, plugins and mambots, you have a wide variety of options available, and we encourage you to check the Joomla Extension Directory for addition packages that fit your needs.

Kunena Backend

The Kunena back-end inside the Joomla back-end of your site, is the place where you manage and adjust the settings and configuration of Kunena. In order to get there, you have to log onto the back-end of Kunena with a userid that has the proper access levels assigned to it.

Please see the Joomla Documentation for more information on how to access the administrative interface.

Kunena provides you with an easy to use, yet feature rich administrative interface, known as the Control Panel, that allows you to customise the appearance and settings of your forum install. You can select from various different templates, decide who and how can access and contribute to your community, integrate with third party components like Community Builder for various different integration options.

The administrative interface allows for changes to the core behavior of Kunena, the integration of images, videos and even live eBay items.

Once you have selected the configuration settings of your choice (they can be changed and adjusted at any point in time) you can move on to define the category structure of your community forum. Categories are the individual boards of your site.

You might setup a Welcome Mat for new members to introduce themselves, and various other categories that help you organise and group the content into meaningful sections. Kunena has a very powerful category system that supports the creation of nested categories, categories inside other categories.

This features allows you to build an entire tree of sections and sub sections and assigned moderators at any level in that tree.

Within the user administration you have control over individuals settings and their avatars, making it simple to make adjustments as your site lives and grows. In addition you can define additional or new Ranks, edit smilies, check all uploaded files and images on your system and perform common site management tasks.

Overall Kunena overs a wide variety of settings that allow you to make the installation your very own.

Now that you have a very basic understanding of Kunena we would like to suggest for you to browse the Documentation Category for additional in-depth details on how to setup and configure Kunena.