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.

This component might be good. The feature list is impressive and it looked like the component i am searching for a long time.

But there are two (really) annoying things:

* These guys are using their own "installer". The installer comes without one line of code of the component but wnats to download the complete code from the companies webserver. The code of the installer is encrypted - so it is hard to guess, what happens en detail during installation (does it send something back to the company?) It's on you, how much you trust an unknown company. The download tooked ages.

* The component won't work within safari. It wants a firefox instead. Well, that might be no problem for some people - but i like my safari, because it is fast and reliable. I don't use firefox very often, becuase it's memory footprint and startup time is something which costs me nerves.

Currently i won't recommend this component because of it's limited compatibility and the fact, that it looks like a black box - and i don't like and would never recommend black boxes.

DocMAN is the best you can get for Joomla 1.0 series. On Joomla 1.5 it sucks a bit. It sucks, because you are forced to use legacy mode in order to run it. It sucks, because the last version is nearly one year old and still not in stable state. It sucks because of it's strange requirements for permissions on the joomla root folder.

On the other hand it has some nice features. A lean (but "seen everywhere") out-of-the-box-design and a good rights management system

But with a look on the slow (not to say nothing-goes) development progress, i ask myself, if this project is still alive or if docman is the "dead-man-walking" in this category of the extension repository.

After reviewing the latest RC, i decided to uninstall it and test other components, because i don't have a good feeling with this project. We'll see... If something moves forward, i will have again have a look on it.

The current stable release during writing this review is "Pantheon".

During test i found out that there are many things that should be improved - most of them are related to a weak quality checks. So there are some relative paths to images which may cause problems with SEO Configurations. Some problems with the markup exist (e.g. wrong coded definition lists). Logical problems are also there (e.g. most active users cannot be disabled completle because of some minor bugs in the control structure of the script).

The default design scheme is - from my point of view - a shame. And the markup could be better (not all elements have class names or ids assigned).

Anyway Agora seems to be currently the best native forum extension for Joomla 1.5 available. The above described problems are minor issues coming from weak quality checks and too short testing periods. Nothing is critical at the moment and at the end of the day the forum works.

An experienced PHP developer can fix the SEO relevant bugs within a couple of minutes.

Can't await to see the next official release "Olympus" which should have a better code base.

Documentation could be better. But this needs more contributors to the project.

Notes:

Agora has currently NO Community Builder Integration (beginning of January 2009)

Converters for the most popular BB-Systems (e.g. phpBB3, Invision etc.) are available (commercial - you have to pay for it, but they are cheap compared to the needed time for writing your own converter!)

Would give "Excellent" rating - but because of the currently existing quality problems, i would reduce this to "Good".

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.