Over 60 quick and direct recipes to help you overcome common Joomla! queries.
Generally speaking, a basic article is a simple matter to create and manage. When a site gets large with a lot of articles, it can be unwieldy. This need is filled by a Content Construction Kit or CCK. Several good CCK’s exist in the Joomlasphere and each has its own unique means to accomplish the task of content management and creation.
For our purposes we’ll look at the CCK known as K2.
K2 provides you an integrated solution that features rich content forms – extending the basic article. This is an article with additional fields that can contain the article images, videos, image galleries or even attachments. Add nested-level categories and tags to that, and you have a very powerful system.
In this article we’ll look at the installation and use of K2.
In this recipe you will go through the steps to install and configure K2 in your Joomla! site.
You will want to download K2 from the following URL: http://getk2.org
Additionally, you may want to have a development site to install and learn this on rather than your production site.
If you are not running the Joom!Fish language translation extension on your site, you will see an informational message stating that K2 did not install the content elements. Joom!Fish is used to translate your site into other languages. If you have no plans on using this, then ignore the message.
Now when you go to Components, you’ll see the K2 icon. Clicking it will show you this screen:
You will see this message (or a similar one depending on your K2 version):
Keep in mind that all of your pre-existing Joomla! sections, categories, and articles are still in the core Joomla! areas. All these items are simply duplicated in K2 now. If you have existing content take a few minutes and go into the Article Manager of Joomla! and unpublish them. You may need to update menu links to your new K2 categories and articles as necessary.
Additionally, you’ll note that the main Joomla! administrator page has been updated to include the K2 dashboard.
K2 has a powerful, nested-category system. It offers you the ability to configure in detail, each category, allowing any category to inherit from another category’s parameter settings.
Let’s use this feature of K2 to configure a master category that will allow other categories to inherit the settings. This means you can change one category and affect them all at the same time – which is quite time-saving.
A word of caution, this could impact your search engine-friendly URLs depending on the extension you use to create them.
I have filled mine out and the following screenshot is the completed Details section. For now, this is all you’ll need to do. Later recipes will utilize this:
This is my master category that all other categories will seek out their parameters from. The reason for this will be clear shortly.
When you have finished, save the category.
K2 is nearly a content management system, like Joomla!, in itself. It actually substitutes many of the native Joomla! functions like article management, section, and category as well as providing some access control functions.
When using K2, you will no longer use many of the native Joomla! menus, but rather you will use the K2 version of the tools. If you install this component, it has the ability to pull in all the data (users, articles) into K2 through the import feature.
In the previous recipe, we set up a master category; now we’ll configure it here.
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