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K2

296 reviews
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Introduction

Content Construction

The powerful award-winning content extension for Joomla with more than 4 million downloads (and counting)!

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 or ACF in WordPress), a powerful plugin API to extend item, category and user forms, ACL, frontend editing, sub-templates & 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 & more, all this bundled under one package!

Give K2 a try & 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
- Tags
- Distinct item image (useful for articles/catalogs), generated in 6 configurable dimensions by default to allow precise image size loading for your site's frontpage, categories/tags etc., side modules and items.
- Image galleries
- Videos
- Attachments
- User pages (author blogs/user profiles)
- Commenting, integrated with Google's reCaptcha & Akismet
- Smart ACL for frontend editing
- Unique plugin system to extend item, category & user forms
- AJAX based frontend editing & comments moderation
- Rest-like JSON/JSONP/RSS/Atom content output
- Native advanced SEF options
- Google Structured Data built-in
- Facebook OpenGraph & Twitter Cards support
- Built-in media manager
- 100% mobile-friendly backend user interface - a joy to edit your content on-the-go
- Total options control, with minimal hassle. Instead of configuring category options over and over, use K2's category option inheritance to allow one category to inherit all options of another category! Or create categories that act as "configuration templates" for other categories (e.g. one set for news/blog posts, another for products, a third for events and so on) and assign them to groups of categories.
- The most advanced, yet easiest to use templating system (with multiple template override sets) to create any type of content you want - the true power of K2!
- Secure & robust by design. Since 2009 when K2 was first release, it has only had low priority vulnerabilities you can count in just one hand, which were swiftly addressed. Just search for "K2" in the Joomla Vulnerable Extensions List (VEL - https://extensions.joomla.org/vulnerable-extensions/resolved/) to verify directly.
- K2 aims for stability and strong backwards compatibility with regular incremental improvements & fixes. No "move fast and break things" mentality here.

K2 integrates fully with the Joomla API, which means any third-party Joomla plugins will function properly within the K2 component & modules, either in the frontend or backend.

AMAZING PERFORMANCE

Pixeden, Groupama, Harvard, High Court of Australia, Amnesty International, Arturia are just some of the thousands of top Joomla sites around the world, fully powered by K2.

K2 also significantly outperforms the default Joomla article system in any real-world configuration, especially in high-traffic scenarios like media/news sites.

COMPATIBILITY

K2 is currently compatible with Joomla versions 1.5, 2.5 & 3.x on servers running PHP versions 5, 7 & 8.

DEPENDENCIES & LICENSE

To fully utilize the built-in media & gallery features we recommend you install AllVideos (free) & Simple Image Gallery Pro, both provided by JoomlaWorks. Both are optional of course.

K2 is developed by JoomlaWorks & licensed under the GNU/GPL 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 & even more modules/plugins to do things like run a news site or a blog.

Visit the K2 Community website: getk2.org

Write a review

One Suggestion....



Posted on 19 February 2010
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.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times...



Posted on 18 February 2010
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.

Magic component



Posted on 17 February 2010
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.

Doesn't quite do it for me



Posted on 08 February 2010
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.

Be careful !!!



Posted on 08 February 2010
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, but



Posted on 05 February 2010
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!!
Owner's reply: K2 DOES have frontend editing. You just need to enable it in the component's parameters and then make sure that users have the right permissions to do so. If they do, when they are logged in the will see add/edit links. Additionally, if you publish mod_k2_login it will add a nice "user toolbar" with more functionality, like frontend comment editing. ;)

Excellent component



Posted on 03 February 2010
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.

Just what I ordered (But I didn't)



Posted on 27 January 2010
This is a great component for doing news, product reviews, etc... I was planning to just use the Joomla content manager but then I stumbled on K2! If you are looking for something to manage articles in a more flexible way than the standard Joomla method then you need to take a look at this component. Great Job guys!

K2 Review and More...



Posted on 22 January 2010
I am going to go ahead and give this K2 a five star rating. First, because the effort to develop this extension is worthy enough, alone. Second, it is rather an awesome CCK, and I use it successfully without hiccups - as the power of it is great.



I do have some issues that I would like to raise.



Basically, it centers around the ability to develop customized templates, and some of the issues that surround it. Other issues include some documentation around tags, the way the .css file system works against templates, inner modules, etc.



I have seen some sub-templates for K2. I wouldnt call them great. just standard. I think to build a sub-template such as by a company like rocekttheme is difficult with the current state of the code. So, i hope future versions correct this.



All in, K2 is a magnificent extension, and much credit goes out to Fotis and Joomlaworks for the genius, will power, and stamina to develop it.

Bad Support, Buggy, But Still Awesome



Posted on 21 January 2010
OK, I only decided to write a review because I am frustrated. But I will try to be fair as well.



I wonder if the owner will reply... since they only seem to pounce on the users that say bad things down there.



This component is certainly powerful and a wonderful way to extend your Joomla website. It has great potential and a lot of the features really should have been in the Core of the CMS anyway. I am currently using it in a small production website. It has allowed me to do some awesome things with my content, and with my ACL for contributors etc!



That said there are some major thorn-in-the-side issues after really using this thing for a while.



First and foremost, there is almost NO documentation for the thing. So get ready to roll up your sleeves and dig in. Setup a dev server and start hacking through it.



The forum (a ning community funny enough) is OK. The developers answer questions from time-to-time but really don't support this thing well enough. I understand it is non-commercial and they have better things to do... gotta pay the bills... but it's really tough sometimes when you simply can't find answers to basic questions. Or all you find is about 10 other posts from other users asking the same question without getting an answer. The best support I've gotten comes from working together with other users who are having the same issue(s) and just figuring it out collectively... often without a Dev even chiming in.



I would gladly pay for this component if it was slightly more mature, documented, and supported vigorously.



SPECIFICS

The "modal" window for the editor is about the worst idea I have ever seen. It causes front-end writers to lock their articles all the time by clicking outside the lightbox (now disabled in latest version)... OR folks on laptops with small screen res simply can't see the close button to check-in their item. This is terrible! I spent many hours on workarounds for this. (i know i know, it's open source and it's free).



Whitespace. Holy crap. They are using a br clearing method in all the php... and while this renders fine on FF and others... it makes for a nightmare in a webkit browser like Safari or Chrome. The k2 content module is virtually useless to me for this reason right now. Webkit browsers are rendering anywhere from 2 - 4 line breaks in a content list... around the breadcrumbs and after some titles. It's very frustrating. And I have so far been unable to find a solution within the k2 community website. But I have found plenty of people complaining and directly asking for Devs to chime in... to no avail.



All that said this IS a very good component with a lot of potential. It's almost kind of sad how much I am willing to deal with it's shortcomings just because the features it does add are so important to my website now.



Devs. Please keep up the good work on the component. PLEASE document it... and make it even better!
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K2

Version:
2.22
Developer:
JoomlaWorks
Last updated:
Mar 26 2026
4 days ago
Date added:
Apr 14 2009
License:
GPLv2 or later
Type:
Free download
Includes:
c m p
Compatibility:
J3
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Uses Joomla! Update System

Demo Support Documentation

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