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

I have used K2 in quite alot of projects and i really love it. It is easy to configure, as also its templating system is excellent.



It will work for most of the cases, but i faced its limitations when i tried to built a quite complex content structure for one of my projects.



So i came up with ~20 content types (extra field groups), some of them with more than 40 or 50 extra fields.



This was a "disaster" since K2 become very slow for these content types (items) ... and now i am trying to find alternatives :( ....
Owner's reply: K2 is *THE* extension for pushing Joomla! to its limits. It's the very reason top Joomla! sites worldwide use K2.

K2 has richer content options compared to the default Joomla! article system and yet it's a lot faster compared it. Now, how did you manage to make a slow site out of K2 remains a mystery...

People some times confuse crappy hosts with Joomla's performance. I'm 100% certain that's the case we deal with here. And in this case, any CMS would perform slowly...

Greate



Posted on 11 August 2013
Greate extension!

I really enjoying it :)



Thanks!

Good, but not for me



Posted on 07 August 2013
First off, I like K2 as a Joomla extension. BUT, In my opinion, the trade-offs don't overcome the benefits. I'll admit I'm no high level developer or admin, but in my mind, K2 really doesn't add that much to Joomla. Back in the J! 1.X days, when you only had two layers of categories to work with K2 was a huge improvement. But these days, without that limitation in J! core, I don't see the big advantage to using it. Now, the disadvantage is that you lose the ability to integrate with a lot of extensions. By this, I mean that pretty much any extension will work with J! core articles, but they're hit or miss on whether they'll work with K2. So for me, the tradeoff isn't worth it. Other drawbacks include the performance hit you'll take by running another program within Joomla and the hassle of dealing with another stylesheet.

Excellent extension



Posted on 03 August 2013
I am pleased to have found, experimented and later implemented K2 in one of my clients website. It works wonderfully and extends Joomla content wisely. Third part extensions support K2 broadly. I am a happy guy now.



Thank your very much.

Good Content Com



Posted on 02 August 2013
I have used K2 for a long time, this is excellent com. Next time I hope K2 Team documentation of K2 version.



Thanks
I've using k2 for several years for my projects. This is the first extension I used to add after installing joomla. The content templating is easy and there are lot of useful functions as commenting and rating system, gallery and extra fields for your items. There are tons of useful extension for it.



BUT THERE IS ONE VERY SERIOUS PROBLEM!!!



If you create catalog system with lots of extra fields (40+) it will dramatically slow down your site in category view. Even if you create custom template to show only few extra fields in category view. The reason of this (I think) is the way extra fields are stored in the database. All of the extra fileds for an item is stored in one database field. If you display for example only 5 extrafields from 40 for each item in category view the system will looping through all extra fields because they are stored in one database field. I tried to get help from developers but there is no answer and no solution. The extra fields would give the real power of a CCK but this way it unusable for items with lots of properties. I hope this will be fixed if so this will be the number one extension.
The extension is almost perfect, if I would only find the way to auto-archive old items, i.e. Items more than 12 months old.
Owner's reply: K2 doesn't have (and doesn't need) an auto-archive feature. The "archive" feature was originally implemented in Joomla!'s default article system as a way to lighten up the database from old articles. K2 is better optimized and so it doesn't need that.

Additionally, you can use the K2 Tools module to list K2 content by month created, similar to a blog archive, as it's usually found in such platforms.
K2 seems stable, looks good, tons of capabilities but I couldn't get past a simple problem. And worse yet, except for a few instances, there remains many users counting myself that have never found a solution and are simply being ignored on the support forums. K2's own registration system seems to conflict with Joomla's own default reCaptcha system. I and others have followed every single piece of advise available, yet the issue remains. So, you end-up with two choices: turn off reCaptcha (not acceptable), or uninstall K2 and go with another system to manage your advanced content ... huge disappointment!!! ... no doubt a dev will respond to this and tell me how much I didn't do.
Owner's reply: Your question is probably answered on the forum already, as it's too simple. Either disable the Joomla! reCaptcha plugin and enable K2's built in or the opposite. Both will work. If they didn't, then maybe some other system or user plugin is to blame. If I were you, I'd disable Joomla! reCaptcha, because K2's can also be hooked up with StopForumSpam, in which case, real human spammers are 95% of the times caught and blocked.

Mixed feelings



Posted on 13 July 2013
according to the description "out of the box" I was quiet surprised how much i had to learn about php and css. I realy put great effort and time in tutorials and learning how to style. Unfortunately I ended up in the lots of forums trying to find ways how to tweak it and make it work in general. Beside the conflicts with images and a responsive template the issue with item view in the subcategory listings listings (that were showing in the category) - and the only solution to get into the php file again ....gave me the rest ...gave up.

Conclusion: if you have knowledge in coding and css ... should be a great component ... for someone who wants a solution out of the box ...stick with joomla itself.
Owner's reply: If you thought K2 was difficult, wait till you try the default Joomla! article system (com_content) templating. We get lots of Joomla! newbies digging into K2 first, instead of com_content and believe K2 is hard to work with. It's not hard, it's how Joomla!'s templating works and these people soon find out when they use com_content. K2's templating is simpler and easier to work with. Most of the times you won't even need to touch the PHP code blocks. Just switch off any elements you don't want per category or even per item. Want to move things around (re-order the item elements)? Just move the marked PHP blocks. Can't get any simpler than that and com_content is far more difficult to work with. That's the reason why we built K2 in the first place...

A final note. Don't expect to get into a proper CMS like Joomla! and NOT learn a few things on HTML, CSS, JS or even PHP. Try modifying a WordPress theme. Joomla! templating will then seem like a walk in the part. Try Drupal. Hell is colder that Drupal theming...

If you don't learn the basics of HTML, CSS, JS & PHP, you'll always feel stuck. And then the only solutions you'll end up with are Tumblr or Blogspot. Even those may require HTML editing as well sometimes... But they'll only be a blog and nothing more.

Can't/don't want to learn the web's languages? Then hire a pro developer.

Things are most of the times simpler than we think.

Simple, Great, Works...



Posted on 11 July 2013
I am building websites using K2 for blogging, news, magazine and product portfolio sites for some time.



Template override and creating new templates per categories are absolutely lights my my.



A Note To Developers : Multi image, Multi Category and Multi extrafiels would be great move for K2 in the future.



and if only you can create thumbs using crop and zoom for equal photos in category blog.
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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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