The Joomla! Extensions Directory ™

I have been using K2 in some capacity since beta. I thought it was pretty good early on, but JoomlaWorks has really done a great job implementing the features that the community wants. The latest version is a fantastic replacement for the Joomla com_content. It works well as a CCK, a blog, or anything else you can imagine.

There are a few features that would be nice, but they seem to be coming in the next version which is already in beta.

Overall this is a great piece of software and one that I use on virtually all of the sites I build.

A great catalog tool with many useful features and a clean front and backend. Documentation may be limited but anyone with a decent understanding of the native J! section/category/article paradigm shouldn't run into too much trouble.

I'm very happy with the templating ability. The CSS is well written and commented and once you set up your own K2 style it's easy to get in and customize extensively.

Extra fields are a nice feature and combined with some CSS edits for the front end can make for very convenient data entry for your front end authors.

Tagging feature is also great and helps a lot for intelligent searches.

So far the ONLY really issue I have is that unlike systems such as VirtueMart, you CANNOT have the same item (product, article, etc.) in multiple categories. This is a big problem for catalog sites that want to reference the same piece of information in multiple locations for ease/method of search.

I really hope this feature can be added soon!

An excellent addition to Joomla, with an great community full of support and wealth of knowledge. I use it on my personal site and have recomended a redesign of my companies site to incorporate this as its so powerful and user friendly.

Amazing! K2 adds so much functionality and new features it's hard to describe. It's like Joomla on steroids. Check it out!

Since K2 appeared, i have used in many of my clients websites and websites from my own. With V 2.2 a big change was made and now it's so flexible that you can use K2 for almost any kind of website. The CSS in the template folder its now another way to customize more the look and feel of the component without loosing its source files.

The support from the developers its also great (considering its a FREE and Open Source component) and the community behind is creating new plugins each day.

Im really glad that someone comitted to create such a wonderfull extension for the Joomla Community.

Thanks a lot guys!

The best component I have ever seen. Great job. It has a lot of options, so you can twist your layout as you want. The only one minor disadventage is that you can not limit words when you do "Latest items from (one or more) users or categories". I hope in the next update it will be added as an option! Thans a lot again!

I discovered this plugin less than a week ago and have since rebuilt my site around it. I won't name names but K2 replaced two other commercial products on my site (a comment system and a blogging system) as well as the built-in content system. Out of the box, K2 has virtually everything a publishing web site could need. This begs the question: Why wasn't all this stuff in Joomla in the first place? All developers and wanna-be developers should give this a try. However, non-technical people might want to stay away, especially if your time is limited. Although the free support forum is pretty good, there is almost no formal documentation for this product.

One more thing. Someone mentioned below that you will "probably" have to buy add-on products for videos and photo galleries. That's only half true. You will need add-ons, but they are totally free and open source.

Unless you are willing to spend hours and hours just figuring K2 out on your own, don't bother installing and using K2. Even the quick start guide did not make a lot of sense unless you already know the K2 lingo. Too bad, because I thought this would really be my answer, but I don't have the weeks it will take to understand how to use and deploy it.

It is a free extension...at least it says it is...

But If you whant to use images, video, etc... You will probably have to pay for one of Joomla Works compenents to do that...

I tought this was ready out of the box. But if you whant it with all it's functions you will have to buy other plugins...

But the thing which dissapointed me most was the fact that they do not have a "decent" search module. If you need some sort of serach module to fiulter results by specific extra fields... Just forget this.

I had to pay more that 100 euros to a joomla programer just to do that. At the end of the day I got it working and I would give it an excelent. But not before I've spent more that 150 euros between freelance programars and extra joomworks plugins...

It is unbeleivable such a "modern" cck does not have at least a decent search module!!! I feel it so unforgivable that I give K2 a "Average" Rating.

I just hope the new ZOO, wich will also be free, has a decent search module, so I can substitute my K2...
***Editors Note***: K2 Does have a built in search module as standard.

Extension is really great with all the "extended" features that offers...BUT!

One of the reasons I wanted to have this extension was for my members being able to use the K2 interface on the frontend, but if you are using Joomfish this is not an option.

I've been happily using K2 for the last 4 months to manage a fairly complicated news website. I have encountered no limitations to what this software can do. If I find a feature on a major news publication that I like, I'm always able to find a way to get it to work in K2. This is the first time I've moved away from hand-coded HTML websites, and I love using a content management system. It's very easy to learn even though there are not a whole lot of tutorials specifically for K2. After playing around with the options for a couple weeks, I had figured most of the options out through trial and error. I think this speaks to both JOOMLA and JOOMLAWORKS for creating very user friendly products.

My favourite features are

- server side resizing of images
- ability to develop multiple sections, subsections, and easily assign different modules to each section (this is a great way to land advertisers who may only want to advertise in certain sections)
- the fact that the initial template for the article page adheres to many current trends
- ability to add extra fields (such as extra title lines, extra information)

Now, to be fair I noticed one comment below that I agree with. The code does not render the web-page in IE the same way it does in Firefox. The difference is usually extra white space in IE. This can be a pain to account for when you are developing the site.

Other than this I'm really happy with this plugin and would recommend it to anyone looking to develop a newspaper/magazine website.

I had got many comments that my site layout was not pleasing to the eye. I installed K2 and the features are incredible - simple to configure - although I had to unlearn a little - even purhased the front slide show - my site has come alive. This is a must have

As always great work from the people at Joomla works. Everything I expected and more in a Blog/catalog CCK......

I am creating a huge site for a hospitality & tourism business. There are tons of categories and I very grateful to have this extension because I NEED it. Tried others, this was THE best!.. One suggestion that I do have is that you add the ability to be able to assign a sub category to multiple parent categories. I have to individually add in restaurants, bars, etc to each city for each province/state for each country. Its going to be a lot of work. If there IS a way to do this I apologize and would appreciate some direction, if not, I hope you can add that in for uses in the future.

K2 is a perfect, almost archetypal, example of the best and worst aspects of the open-source movement.

The best in that it is an obviously well developed product, with oodles of features and functionality and a devoted user community.

The worst in that it has (as is all too common) next to no documentation. The sole piece of documentation, a "quick step-by-step guide", tells you in 12 rote steps "what" to do to get K2 basically-kinda'-sorta' up and running, without touching on whys. OK, I've got extra field groups and extra fields. That's nice. What are they for?

I know that they say that this product is not for Joomla beginners (which I'm not); but more honestly, it should say that the product is not for anyone who does not have 6 to 12 hours to spare mucking about and kicking the wheels to figure out the workings of the system. Judging by the mostly positive reviews here, there are a lot of such users who are willing to do so, and more power to you. I’m not one of them. I resent having to re-invent the wheel, 'cause it's so inefficient and unnecessary, and a waste of my time.

Deleting K2 from my system for now, which is a pity, 'cause it does seem good; I'll check back in a six months or so to see if anyone has documented anything yet.

One of the Best Joomla Component ever. Nice work. With this component you can make catalogue, reservation system. Its working with Breezing Forms, so you can make own shop. Setting is absolute magic. You can set everything. Just need time to learn, what can be possible. Html absolute clean. And its free. Magic.

This should be a knock em' dead component but on the three sites I have used it on I have taken it off for various reasons. While undoubtadly the concept is great I think it needs a couple more revisions before it is truly ready and by then, well, Joomla 1.6 will be on the cards and possibly make some of the reasons why K2 is so useful on paper redundant.

In terms of funcionality the product stacks up pretty well albeit that you are pretty much on your own as to working out how to use and integrate it into your site. The article look better than core Joomla and for blogs and community sites work well. For a magazine based site, or for vertical sites such as property / rental management the look is less useful and for the life of me I can't get the articles to carry the global settings across (of which there are hundreds - this is both good and bad) and therefore I often ended up spending ages changing the article settings to remove all the bloggy user related stuff.

I also feel that their could be more layouts provided and that the core look of an article is pretty close to that provided by Joomla anyway. Sure it is nice to have the integrated gallery (I have never got this to work mind you) and the other bits and bobs but I would relly like to choose 1, 2 or 3 columns on an article by article basis as well as have some CSS options for article styling. Maybe I have missed this and this is all there - a manual might help here.

My biggest problem though is the system plugin which doesn't seeme to sit well with some applications and in chrome and IE8 cause the page to only part load. This makes the component pretty useless for me and perhaps others. I am not blaming the K2 plugin - it just doesn't seem to sit nice with some important core components.

Overall, if you have a simple blog site or community, want someting better than core joomla styled articles and can live with (or get round) some plugin conflicts then this is defo the product for you. If however you have some complex stuff going on and want more control over how articles are presented then you might still be looking.

What you can't fault of course is that it is free and for that it is to be applauded.

Well, all in all this is really a fantastic extension but still, you need to be careful before you choose to use it depending on your needs. For example, if you want to have a bilingual site with Joomfish you will have to say goodbye to frontend editing option in K2. Furthermore, you can also forget about auto archiving because there is no such thing in K2. I was foolish enough to use K2 before checking all these things and now I'm stuck because I need all of the above : Joomfish, frontend editing and auto archiving. Also, there are no replies on the forum... now, make your own decision about K2.

Great extension but as usual the non-programming users have some more wishes ;) Only four stars, because: Unfortunately, you come with your own comment system. Thats fine but if on the rest of your site you use another comment system you have to restructure the whole site and/or delete exisitng comments. Second point, why is there no option to edit an article from front-end? I would give six or even more stars if the functionality this extension offers would complement the already existing functionality of the standard Joomla! installation. That's, btw, a deficit I also encountered with other CCKs. Apart from that: I very much admire the work you guys do for FREE for us! Thanks a lot!!

We make use of this component on a regular basis!

The category structure is nice and fits with the menu layouts we create so the clients that end up using our sites have no issues at all working with it.

I also love that we can build multiple custom templates for outputting K2 content, we can create a category for events that are laid out entirely different than standard content pages for example.. This ability is one of the key reasons we use this component so extensively.

Generally speaking, when we build a site for someone and use K2, the end-user can do virtually everything within K2 without ever needing another component.. I've even built a shopping cart around it.