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Kunena has the potential to be the most featurerich and user friendly forum component for joomla.

Well thought functions, everything a user expects and ease of use are markable features of this Fireboard successor.

But currently it is only available as a legacy version and therefore i would never recommend to use it in a native environment: The price for switching to legacy just for an forum is to much for me.

I know that the friendly developers are working on this issue and i hope that they get out an native version soon because i really want to kick that phpBB3 into the trashcan.

Keep it on your watchlist but give it some time to get matured! If it comes out native, an "Excellent" rating will be fair.

First at all the concept of this component is really good. It is what i need and what 've looking for. But anyway there are some really anoying things which i want to tell the valuable reader of my review:

* The country drop down does not use a translation or database table - it is done in PHP and it seems to be only available in french. Nice for french webpages but useless for the most webmasters.

* The code contains partial javascript elements with hardcoded french texts (e.g. form validator). This may be convenient for french people but again useless for the rest of the world and it is - of course - hard to translate.

* The dropdown for the salutation hast a hardcoded french text and exactly 3 hardcoded entries - fortunately the 3 texts are in the language file. Anyway the user has in 99% the "fun" to search for hardcoded french stuff.

* The form is not easily extendable. For my purposes i also need the academic title of a subscriber and also the birthday for statistical puposes.

* There are several lines of commented code within the scripts (why?)

* The Webpage for the download seems to be for french people only. The poor translation tool does not really work and so you have to deal with the french stuff.

From my point of view it is hard to understand why a author creates a component for french people only and releases it to the world. This is not really good for a large group of users.

I recommend that the author removes the hardcoded crap from the code. I don't have anything against the french language - but currently it takes me more time to translate the script then to write a new based on the concept. And i think this should not be neccessary.

A alternative to remove the crap is to make a big red sticker "FRENCH LANGUAGE ONLY" to prevent webmasters from wasting time.