For the longest of time, the Joomla Community has been debating and fighting over the availability of a serious CCK Component or at best for Joomla Core to have a kick-ass CCK extension built in. Like most good things, it takes forever. Enter Joomlaworks and their awesome team. I have tested K2 v2.0.0.

The Joomlaworks team have created a component that answers 80% of our troubles. The K2 component plugins into Joomla gracefully and adds functionality that we only used to dream of.

With K2, you can easily and quickly transform your Joomla! website to a blog, portfolio or magazine. Perhaps the most compelling thing is that with each article you can have a video, gallery + document attachment. This simply makes what you can do with this components almost endless. You can use it as a video blog, or a document repository.

The templates are well coded and effortless to modify, with little knowledge of PHP + CSS. Advanced users can find the template structure a breeze to work with and given that with each menu link or category, you can choose a different template, your imagination is the only thing that can limit you. You can add extra fields if you feel the numerous provided ones do not meet your requirements.

K2 is also fully packed with its own ACL. You can create several user groups, with different permissions, ranging from what categories the group has access to, to what they can view of the published content.

Did I mention that Social networking is also in this little component? No need to install another module or plugin that covers what has become today’s standard. Twitter, Digg, Stumble are just but a few of the preinstalled social networking icons.

Some things I thought would be good to improve on – they’re just pendantic small issues really:

  • Ability to assign a single post to multiple categories.(the arguement of using tags instead of multiple categories is ringing in my head, but I say give me the option and I’ll not use it if I wish!)
  • Conflicts with other components, like JomSocial, NoixACL, Sobi Extensions like the gallery
  • SEF URLs behave funny if you’re using SH404SEF
  • Double qoutes in title. Now this an interesting one. If you use double quotes in or an apostrophe in the title, it breaks the post. Weird huh…
  • Frontend editing has small things that are just simply irritating.
    • Users can still see all the categories on the site even if they have no permission to access them.
    • If a user is using low resolution like 1024 X 768 some of the fields are not visible. Even the close button is hidden.
    • If user articles need to be moderated before their published. When the user saves on the frontend, the window closes and redirects to a 404 page, which displays in the lightbox!

Other CCK like components

All in all a great component and I like it. When I test the upgraded version, we’ll see how it goes. Maybe my next blog will be on Joomla! and not Wordpress after all!! Yipee!!

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