K2



- Yes
--- WHAT IS K2? ---
K2 provides an out-of-the box integrated solution featuring rich content forms for items (think of Joomla! articles with additional fields for article images, videos, image galleries and attachments), nested-level categories, tags, comments, a system to extend the item base form with additional fields (similar to CCK for those acquainted with Drupal), a powerful plugin API to extend item, category and user forms, ACL, frontend editing, sub-templates and a lot more!
Using K2, you can transform your Joomla! website to a news/magazine site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing and more, all this bundled under one package!
Give K2 a try and you'll instantly love it! It's easy to use and fun to develop websites with! If you need any help or want to contribute to the project, join us at the K2 community.
--- FEATURES ---
Since K2 is extensible with additional fields to its base item form, you can easily create category-specific content types, e.g. article, blog post, product page, directory listing.
K2 offers as standard:
- nested-level categories (no section/category restrictions)
- commenting, integrated with reCaptcha
- tags
- item image (useful for articles/catalogs)
- image galleries
- videos
- attachments
- user pages (author blogs/user profiles)
- ACL for content
- Unique plugin system to extend item, category and user forms
- ajax-based frontend editing
- ajax-based comments moderation
- Google AJAX Search integration
- Native JSON/JSONP content output
- Native advanced SEF options (added in K2 v2.6.4+)
K2 fully supports the Joomla! API, which means all Joomla! plugins will function properly within the K2 component & modules, either in the frontend or backend.
--- AMAZING PERFORMANCE ---
ImpactWrestling.com, OnSports.gr, Gorillaz.com, Groupama-Transport.com, Harvard, Cloud.com (Citrix), the High Court of Australia, MTV Greece, Jaguar Greece are just some of the thousand "big sites" around the world, fully powered by K2.
--- REQUIREMENTS & LICENSE ---
To utilize the built-in video & gallery features you need to install AllVideos (free) & Simple Image Gallery Pro, both provided by JoomlaWorks.
K2 is developed by JoomlaWorks & licensed under the GNU/GPL v2 license.
--- WHAT NEXT? ---
Try K2! Install it, hit the "import" button to bring your Joomla! articles inside K2, start playing with the component to see the flexibility it provides first-hand. Moreover? You no longer need a dozen of components and even more modules to do things like run a news site or a blog. Drupal and Wordpress have certainly met their match now! ;)
--- USEFUL LINKS ---
Visit the K2 website & community: http://getk2.org
** Try it on at least two sites before dismissing it **
1. It supercharges your Joomla site with functionality we've always dreamt of (nested categories, author profiles, tagging, comments, sharing features, auto-sized images etc).
2. It's damn easy for the users to get used to - we've used it for several sites now, and it's rare that the end users putting the content in ever need to come back to us for more training or assistance.
Get to know K2 and you'll grow to love your Joomla all over again.
I am surprised how many people complains about lack of support. I would really recommend you guys one simple thing: "use Google first" .
Seriously, the only way to learn things properly is by discovering things step by step, sometimes it's learning from mistakes. I don't understand this demanding attitude towards the brilliant product(that is FREE by the way). And please, give back to community, share with others, who can also benefit from your learning. Community co-operation is the biggest power of Joomla! and also K2. It's not "a customer is always right" corporate rules, it's the chance for you to learn and develop new skills, to share your knowledge and build something more...
And if you really stuck, be persistent and keep asking... I am sure you'll get your answer.
I've been using K2 CCK system for a long time now, and I find it difficult to understand that people, who use Joomla! have problem to use K2, or that they don't understand how it works. Looks like everyone wants all done for them and they call them self web-developers (a lot of people do!).
Its the simplicity that makes K2 the superior CCK we got for Joomla! I read about people crying there hearts out because they have to change the CCS to make it "fit" on there pages... that must be a joke?! Of cause you have to do that!
The structure that K2 uses is simple enough so you can easy make you own 'templates' in a flash. There are tons of doc on "how to's" for how to use K2, and not on how you make-it-you-own-style, but I think thats not up to JW to learn pepople how do develop pages.
Sit down, take 10 min. and at least try to understand the working structure and the design structure, and you will get things done!
Tip (just in case): Strip a page (ex. item.php) make snippets of the code in DW. up you page and paste the snippets. On with Live view and do the CSS changes in DW. Done! IF this is to much/hard for you, I recommend Rockettheme.com and/or Joomlart.com who have premium templates with nice K2 supported design...
However the more you use K2, the more you understand that its not ready to be applied on professional websites so far for the following reasons.
1. Support of K2 do not Exists (Do not bother by sending the developers technical requests as they will not answer) "I hope the developers will not get offended by that, instead they should answer the 100's of unattended posts in their forum"
2. Compatibility issues with Internet Explorer, K2 has many limitations with Internet explorer and in many cases the content will get damaged, i highly advice designers/developers to check the site on Internet Explorer to avoid serious embarrassment.
3. Adaptability issues: This is not an error but a limitation in K2, as K2 contains so far single format to display the content ie. if you want to publish the article image on right side and header and content on left side in Category view, you have to manually hardcore modify the CSS files to be able to do that!
4. Simplicity : Again the main success of any software is the simplicity, although K2 has a very powerful, yet easy interface however when you want to adapt it to you design/Template/Business requirements its difficult.
To sum all that up, i will say that K2 is a very powerful project, but i will not yet advice to use it in any serious business site as it should be yet beta version.
If you're over having to make Sections and Categories for items that would just suit one category, or you want to have nested categories (categories inside categories inside more categories) then this is the core upgrade for you.
There are stacks of K2 plugins available, like Autotweet NG for K2, JComments for K2, Kunena and K2 User integration etc. The only one I really struggled with was Jomsocial, but in the end I found the plugins I needed.
Highly recommend!
I read some of the reviews of people having problems...was a little leary at first...but thank goodness I tried it.
Had a couple little problems...but the K2 forum answered them.
This is a must have.
The documentation is not descriptive enough for people trying to use K2 for the first time. I have a feeling that it has been translated from another language. Thus being a bit disjointed. With better documentation I believe every joomla user out there would be using this and no one would be able to fault K2! http://simon.getk2.org/ confused me more than helped! Playing with the plugin for a couple days is the only way to understand K2.
I'm not missing the point,I'm not a Joomla Newbie,
I have all the facts. This is just constructive criticism. I can't fault K2 otherwise.
Thank for making such a powerful plugin free and accessible to the Joomla community.
It's a known fact K2 is dead simple to use, even for newbiews. That is beacuse it's similar in structure to the default Joomla! article system.
Let's forget that for a sec... On simon.getk2.org you can find DOZENS of tutorials, tips and more on K2. Even if you didn't hit the "documentation" or "tutorials" buttons found across all getk2.org websites, I'm sure it wasn't difficult to spot that huge banner we have on the frontpage of the left column, top, on thw K2 Community... But then again...
So i came to the website (getk2.org) and i tried to ask about my problems. too bad. this forum is just to busy so everyone busy with their own problom. i put my post in bugs forum. well i do have some answers but nothing solved.
I almost turned my eyes to another extension, until someday i recognized that i haven't yet ask simon. So then, i go to simon.getk2.org. and gladfully i found my answer. and it solved. simon gave my the hack to solve the problem about the iframe, that makes me desperate. Thanks to Simon.
Now i'm using 2.3 vers. its not stable yet. but its works fine on my site.
so, if you want to use this great extension, u should also warn with the documentasion. and maybe you should ask simon to.
This program not only did not allow me to do what I hoped to do, but it ultimately broke my website. After unpublishing and disabling all content of K2, my site worked fine. When I uninstalled it, my site mysteriously stopped working and went to an error page. Only reinstalling K2 has allowed the site to work again. So now I have this program that is useless to me being a required component to keep my site up, I guess that does make it useful finally.
1)There is NO way to pull up an Article submission form from the frontend with this program. You cannot set this up in your menus from the menu editing Joomla backend. None of the modules link to an article submission form. The Jomsocial plugin for this doesn't do it. And the default Article Submission form doesn't do it. There's just simply no solution I have found for this. And the documentation is backwards and does not address this issue in any way.
2)The backend tools are just not easy or friendly to use. Every other component I have used had configuration options where it is modified directly within the component menus, pretty much the standard setup for a Joomla component. This is backwards as well, because all this stuff is done from the MODULES. This not only doesn't make sense, and makes it a pain to change configurations from this, but also makes things more difficult if people need to modify the modules for specific things so that it does not break the editing options on the backend in the Module Manager for these modules.
3)Unable to find any easy way to import my existing Joomla articles into K2. Every other program I've used that is supposed to complement or extend the functionality of a similar built-in Joomla function allows you to import data into this new item so you can work with it i.e Community Builder and Jomsocial with userlists, but no such luck here. This should be functionality BUILT-IN to the program.
4) I found no features or functionality that I did not already get with Joomla's built in article setups. I downloaded JCE to make the editor easier/better to use and that helps with Article submissions. So this pretty much was nothing but Bloatware for my purposes. Feel free to try it, but make sure it doesnt get integrated too tightly into your site, you might ruin the site if you need to get rid of this.
You are obviously an impatient Joomla! newbie, so I'll throw in the following facts for you...
First of all, K2 is a standalone component. It does not need any other Joomla! extension to function. It just requires Joomla!. If you uninstalled K2 and your site "broke" I can only guess the following: you uninstalled the component, yet you forgot some menu items pointing to K2.
On to your ramblings now...
1. K2 supports frontend submission by default. Just publish the mod_k2_login module in some position. When you log in through the module, you will see a menu of editing options, including content submission. Set K2's ACL properly and you get a powerful system to handle dozens of writers.
2. What you refer to clearly shows your level of Joomla! knowledge. K2 maintains the "category" display options where it should: in the category. The fact that Joomla! has such options in the menu does not mean it's right. The modules are quite powerful and replace the functionality of at least 20 equivalent non K2 modules...
3. You must be blind, right? The K2 dashboard has a big button top right that says "import Joomla! content". Nothing more to say to that.
4. Of course. Comments, tags, nested categories are all included in Joomla! 1.5...
To finish up, I can either guess 2 things:
a) You either installed K2 and played with it for around 5 mins and that was it.
b) You tried installing K2 on Joomla! 1.6, which is not a stable release and therefore K2 is not yet compatible with it.
My best guess is the latter one...
For myself, I have been using K2 for 6 months now, and I love it. Works perfectly. For the first time in the 5 years that I have used Joomla I don't have to mess with trying to integrate a million different components, modules and plugins to try and get comments, tags, etc... SO easy and clean.
My only suggestion for improvement is the double login at the admin side...maybe I can fix that problem? But I have not figured out how?
And, also the 'main photo'. Perhaps I just have not found out how or where...but I cannot seem to figure out how to make it 'adjust'. What I mean is, I upload the 'main photo' through the upload page (second tab I think) on the article submission form...and then in the article it always appears full size at the top, centered...and the article text can never go around it...it would be nice if we had more power over how that main image was placed and what size it would be, etc.: e.g. left justified, center (as it is now), right justified, etc... ?
Otherwise, great work...keep it up...and please know that most of us DO appreciate all the time and effort that goes into this free component.
My issue are the following
-only a single category per post
-a much nicer tag cloud
-There are just too many options.Would have been good if they were all disabled by default then you can set them when you need.but it is the oposite and it is very fustrating to have to unset so many options in the admin.
-An email on user comment would also be nice.
The documentation isn't bad (no matter what others may say), but it can be confusing to learners. The docs assume that you are mildly tech-ish...which is great for some, but it reads like gibberish to others. No worries.
I doubt this will even be posted, but the attitude of "The Owners" has me put off a bit. Obviously unable to take criticism and then launching into snarkish comments isn't the best way to win public support. Sometimes 'users' may irritate you with questions, or fire out a complaint without really knowing what they're talking about, but that doesn't give free license to condescend or feel 'superior'. And THAT is what comes across more than anything in the Owner's Comments: They feel superior.
Well, I assure you that a lot of people out here aren't inferior, and it would benefit whatever business you're in to realize that. Learn how to take it on the chin, even when people are wrong. Try to educate without being a jerk about it. And then you'll have a loyal following. As of right now, I've decided against using the software as my own personal boycott. It's a shame too...the software is pretty good. But it's not the only game in town. I'd work on remembering that if I were they.
Since your comment was indeed published on the JED -although it's not referenced to the extension itself- it would be more practical and/or helpful to provide some links of such arrogant behavior (to further strengthen your point) instead of just calling the K2 team arrogant... Cause I doubt you'll find any... If we were arrogant or feeling superior, we'd keep K2 to ourselves and NOT
a) spend half of our coding time to K2 or
b) give it away for free or
c) support it for free
Guess you never thought of these things, right?
and front-end editing should be a standard.
also i don't like, that it separates itself from the core articles, and doesn't have it's own advanced search :(
it is nice, and all, but it if you want multilingual content, or frontend editing for the client, this is not a good choice :(
Looks like you've never used K2, because if you did, you'd see that BOTH frontend editing and Joom!Fish support are standard K2 features since day 1 of its release...






