Agreed. It would be
nicer if new development initiatives were taken up by the developers. It's unfortunate that, when people ask questions about
Chronoforums, the responses one sees from various forum moderators is "I don't know anything about
Chronoforums, but ...". Although the forum moderators here do their best to attempt to help those of us seeking help, it underscores the dearth of available development effort for this particular Joomla extension.
Keep in mind that it's "slim pickings" when it comes to finding a low-cost forum product for your Joomla website. The main choices (I guess) lie between implementing a bridge between Joomla and
phpBB or using Joomla "natively". On the "native" side, the main contenders are
Kunena and
Chronoforums; there are other products but, from what I've seen of them, they are not enjoying the same level of "popularity" as the ones I've mentioned.
I understand, of course, that the developer of
Chronoforums probably gets next-to-nothing in return for his hard work and, when there's no incentive—at least, in a financial sense—it becomes increasingly difficult to re-energise one's earlier motivation. I get it. I know this as a person who has developed Joomla extensions and offered them for sale. Even though I see dozens of visitors where my own products and services are available, no-one's buying anything. I don't see my efforts translated into anything that compensates me for a fraction of the amount of time I invested in constructing what I offer for sale. So, when there's no financial incentive to do anything, what future can we expect of
Chronoforums?
It's ironic, isn't it, that people spend money for peripheral nonsense (like "SEO enhancement" for example) when you don't
need to pay anything—in fact, and many of these so-called improvements/enhancements actually cause
more headaches than they're supposed to cure—and are not prepared to pay for something that actually
generates content on their websites. People spend their money on gimmicks, in playing the popularity game, yet expect that a forum component—something that visitors to their websites
actually interact with—should be available at zero cost?
I agree that it would be nice if the several ideas I've read about improving
Chronoforums were seriously taken up.
Chronoforums 1.1.5 has been around for the past 9 months. In terms of style, it has a lot going for it (leaving out the issue of <DIV> vs. <TABLE>) but, in terms of structure it requires a thorough overhaul. Remembering that
Chronoforums is not MVC-compliant, it's like a J! 1.5 component that was given band-aid surgery to allow it to work with J! 2.5-3.
x, until this basic matter of MVC compliance is addressed (and this is going to require a significant development effort) I suspect that there will be a drag in turning out small improvements such as a new forum template design that refactors <TABLE> elements as <DIV>.
Good luck in seeing these ideas come to fruition.
