I was a big fan of FireBoard when it first came out as it was a forum you could install in Joomla and it didn't require any bridges. However, I quickly became very disheartened, mostly because it really didn't move on or seize the potential. We now all know why, but at the time, it was hard to see a great extension not live up to it's potential.

So hard, that others forked from the FireBoard project, while many just gave up and started using SMF or phpBB. The latest to use the FireBoard code are the people that have started up Kunena, which I'm reliably informed is Swahili meaning "to speak" and the news trickling in is that the guys over at FireBoard have given up and they're going to endorse Kunena as the official successor of FireBoard.

The good news is, this has all happened just as I'm starting to play again with the likes of SMF, the new phpBB3 and vBulletin as I've got a project coming up that needs a forum - one that would best be suited to having it work with Joomla too, so it's now time to play with Kunena and hope that there is a native 1.5 version coming soon too!

So, to summarise, FireBoard was a great project but it never really took off in the way it could have, but we now have Kunena which hopefully will. It has the potential and with a little bit of love and a lot of work, maybe it will. I sure hope so.

Update: The news on a native 1.5 version is that the developers are hoping for it to be ready in a couple of months. This seems very quick and I hope they're close, because the worst thing that could happen is that they get us all excited for nothing. On the development side of things, I'd rather we were told 'it will be ready next year' and get a pleasant surprise when it hits us six months ahead of schedule.

Still, this is a new project and just because it's based on FireBoard doesn't mean it's going to be as slow as FireBoard.