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

First of all thank thank you K2 dev team for a lot of time spent on creating free extension for Joomla! community. My previous speaker said that K2 SEO is bad - everybody who know's anything about search engins optimisation will dissagree with this kind of opinion. K2 provide great SEO compatibility and gives users everything they need to be seo friendly. You can always adjust the script to your needs! Do not forget that SEO is difficult subject and and sometimes expensive work. Please to think twice before adding a review and remember about Joomla community values: freedom, equality, trust, community, collaboration and usability! Grreetings from Poland :)
Owner's reply: "Please think twice before adding a review and remember about Joomla community values: freedom, equality, trust, community, collaboration and usability!"

Couldn't agree more!
I've been using K2 for over 3 years now and it is a good component as long as you don't run into issues. Trying to get help in the forums is mind numbingly slow. It's usually only one mod helping everyone "thanks William". There are several legitimate bugs posted in the forums and the Dev never responds. Too bad because the platform it self is great, but there is a serious lack of support.
Owner's reply: Actually, K2 is one if the most actively developed extensions in the Joomla! community. There is of course a separate bug tracker for that, but all bugs reported in the forums are monitored. Of course, most of the times, they're not real bugs but they are just generic Joomla! usage issues, which some users believe are K2 related (they aren't obviously).

Lastly, if you are making money off K2, then consider hiring some of the companies listed in the forum to help you out, or just post your project in the related forum board on getk2.org/community. Don't expect that the K2 dev team will solve project specific issues you might have, neither will any other open source project.
After seeing all the positive remarks regarding K2 I thought wow... this sounds like the best Joomla extension ever! Then I installed it and realised it is just another Joomla extensions.



Then I realised it does not support pagination and wondered why I installed it in the first place.



Documentation is pretty bad too.
Owner's reply: It doesn't do pagination... Hmmm... http://demo.getk2.org/categories
The K2 is a great tool to get the articles in combination with templates done. But as it seems the architecture of the component is buggy as the articles are available over several urls.



Since my projects also need's a good page ranking this is a no go for me and I have to switch to another tool. (As long as the support from K2 is also very poor as also others writing herein.)

The only thing I want todo with this posting is to get the SEO part in mind of each who is on the way to try K2.
Owner's reply: K2's SEO is not just great, it's in fact amazing. For 2 reasons primarily. No.1 for its native URL construction (to the limit the Joomla! API allows it to be) and no.2 for it's HTML construction with the correct use and ordering of HTML elements.

If by SEO you just mean the URLs, then I suggest you try other extensions before moving away from K2 as you're in for a big surprise! What do I mean? If you don't create menu items to some Joomla! component, yet you retrieve this component's content from some module, you're bound to have /component/name/whatever in the URLs.

So do some homework first before judging something badly.

I'll say this now and I'll keep repeating for a very long time to come: it's no wonder why ALL today's big/popular Joomla! sites are built with K2. ;)

One final tip: Wanna improve your URL SEO drastically? Grab a license for sh404SEF or AceSEF. They both work flawlessly with K2 as we work closely with these 2 dev teams.
If your not using K2 you are limiting your sites potential.



I wouldn't have a Joomla site without it. I have categories within categories within categories! It really takes shape after you modify the template or make a few.
If you need an all-in-one solution then K2 is a good choice. Lots of the most used add-on functionality are already presents.

I don't have a good feeling with this "I do everything" packages. Is not always possible to replace the components I do not like with 3rd party add-on.

Documentation is poor and dated.



Well, this is only my personal judgment. If you need a simple way to use Joomla with a lot of stuffs then give K2 a try.
Owner's reply: Actually, a lot of people find K2 easier to setup and have running in minutes compared to the default Joomla! article system.

This boils down to a) setup parameter continuity in K2 (unlike the default Joomla! article system which mixes category specific parameters with general ones) and b) simpler yet more efficient template overrides. Just count the template overrides in com_content plus its modules. Or think "why do I need a newsflash module or recent articles module" when they could simply be 1 module with 2 different content retrieval filters (random and latest created)...

We've answered all these questions that puzzled developers minds years ago with the creation of K2. Anyone else who might insist that com_content is better than K2 in terms of content management (and I'm not referring to you - just some so called "Joomla! evangelists" who don't know the difference between HTML and CSS) is either lying or he's never used K2 or he's never used Joomla! at all - in my personal opinion of course.

Bunch of problems



Posted on 05 May 2012
Read bunch of great comments and thought the K2 is great. After installation, i struggled for 2 days and now going to dump the K2.

Used latest K2 for Joomla 2.5.



1. The transfer of items from Joomla was not good - unwanted junk was transferred but the new categories that I created did not transfer. But hey this is small! Categories I can retype manually.



2. More important - comments do not work as promised.

Any unwanted user-spammer can type in his URL link and there is no way to switch it off, unless you ban the user. I did not find an option to forbid outgoing links.



While searching for the solution in K2 comments options - modules etc ( did not find any option to switch off URL from unregistered user) but found CAPTCHA option. Turned CAPTCHA on and it does not work at all - on the page there is claim to put in 2 words , but no words displayed. So no user can use it at all now.



Even worst - that CAPTCHA option disappeared form the module - WOW - not able to turn on, or turn off.



Too many bugs.



Tried to find info on the K2 forum and see that similar questions about comments and CAPTCHA are sitting there for months without any forum support.



So, K2 is for heavy programmers who love to struggle with bugs and debug things.



Frustrating experience.
Owner's reply: Replying...

1. Migration from the default Joomla! article system is done manually. It's not automatic (why would it be). If you saw "junk" coming into K2 then junk was placed in your Joomla! articles. Of course new categories that you create in the Joomla! article system will not be reflected into K2 unless you import them first.

2. Comments work EXACTLY as they should. You just need to have a clue of the technologies involved before using them. E.g. for reCaptcha to work, you need to get to keys (free) from recaptcha.google.com. Had you read the tooltip explanations on each K2 parameter you would've known that of course. Got a problem with real human spammers? Cut them off by enabling the built-in StopForumSpam.com support and/or enabling comment moderation. K2 not only has the best possible anti-spam protection, it also protects your entire Joomla! site from spammers when you enable the built-in StopForumSpam.com options.

To recap things, you've mentioned no bug so far, just misconfiguration from your side. And if you got no response, that's because the answer was sitting right there for you in the K2 parameter tooltips.

Lastly, if K2 was for programmers only, a) it would not have 750.000+ downloads so far and b) it would not be used on high profile Joomla! sites worldwide...

Excellent job



Posted on 19 April 2012
The component is really great, combined with K2 Store it's even greater:). Thank's a lot.

Good but...0 support?



Posted on 17 April 2012
Good for a free extension,not excelent...and has a lot of bugs yet.For example I have K2 on a site and have set the 'print' and 'email' buttons to show on all items. The Print button works fine but when I test the Email button, the form appears but upon hitting send I get an error message, "Email could not be sent".

So if nobody helps then why using it?

SEO



Posted on 12 April 2012
I like K2, its one of most popular joomla componets. and I'm really sorry to say that this component is not SEO friend because each item in the website is reachable with different URLs. Since 2 months ago that I installed K2, I have thousands of duplicated articles in my "google webmaster" account, and this problem will affect strongly on google organic traffic, so your site will die as my website. I tried to find a solution on official K2 forum but there were many request about this problem without reply or solution.
Owner's reply: This is not entirely true. Let me explain...

Duplicate entries depend on your menu structure. If you have a menu that maps all your K2 categories (or at least the most imporrtant ones), then you won't have duplicate entries.

To further mitigate that, one of the things we want to add in K2 v2.5.7 is canonical URLs to prevent Google from seeing duplicate item entries (if they exist).

That should further improve K2's SEO features.

Unlike the default Joomla! content or other CCK extensions, K2 already sports much better SEO. From the "read more" links which contain the item's title, to the images, to author links etc. etc. ;)
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K2

Version:
2.20
Developer:
JoomlaWorks
Last updated:
Jan 02 2026
1 month 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

Score:


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