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Has K2 opened the door to more opportunities for Joomla? We think so.

mike-johnston Profile

For those who are unaware, K2 is a component for Joomla that provides the popular CMS with the ability to further customize the way content is displayed on your site. Users who have played with or used Drupal at some point might best equate this to being similar to CCK (Content Construction Kit) but for Joomla.

K2, designed by Joomla developers, JoomlaWorks adds an incredible amount of flexibility and allows developers and web masters to do some pretty amazing things with their content.

This video best highlights some of it's capabilities:

(Note: Video from March 20, 2010)

The opportunities that K2 present for Joomla are pretty incredible and given how easy the component is to use, it has, in our opinion, opened the door to far more usage possibilities than were previously available.

There is a demo site online that showcases some of the various things that can be done with the product. You can check it out at http://demo.getk2.org/.

K2 also appears to have sparked a lot of interest (not surprisingly) in the Joomla developer community and a large number of plugins have begun to crop up in the extensions directory. As of last count, there was around 130 new extensions that make use of K2. That's a pretty impressive number.

In speaking with Fotis Evangelou, lead developer for JoomlaWorks, he mentioned the following key accomplishments for K2:

  1. All Joomla template providers now support K2 by default on all new templates that they release.
  2. It's the first extension to have passed official security/code auditing by the Joomla core team in order to be used on the Joomla! Community Magazine
  3. K2 was the first component in the Joomla! community to get an award for component of the year at the Joomla! and Beyond 2010 conference that was held in Germany this year.  (full story here)
  4. K2 has been downloaded over 350,000 times in the last year and a half and has been translated into dozens of languages. It is also one of the top extensions in the Joomla Extensions Directory.
  5. The Joomla Extensions Directory contains over 130 extensions that makes use of or link into K2 content in one way or another which is a huge accomplishment for the component.
  6. K2 powers two of the world's top Joomla websites in absolute visitor count. They are Gazzetta.gr and TNAWrestling.com.

These are just some of the accomplishments of this fine product. If you've been considering using Joomla but have felt restricted somehow in the past, you need to do yourself a favor and install it with K2. You'll be astounded by the amount of functionality it adds to any stock Joomla installation.

You can get K2 from the official Joomla extensions directory: http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/news-production/content-construction/8061 or learn more by visiting the official K2 website at: http://getk2.org