In order for K2 to inherit the styling from the template, and have the same appearance as the demo, you will need to go to Admin → Components → K2. Select Parameters from the button menu in the upper right of the administrator, and set Enable K2 base CSS to No then save.

K2 is a content construction component (similar to CCK for those acquainted with Drupal), which lets you create custom content types (items) for your Joomla! website. With K2, you can transform your Joomla! website to a news site with author blogs, product catalogs, work portfolio, knowledge base, download/document manager, directory listing, event listing and more, all this bundled under one component. Again, Affinity has styled support for this component to visually integrate the powerful component from JoomlaWorks.gr.

Note: K2 will not be available as part of the RocketLauncher.

Advanced Features

K2 is well beyond the capacity of the ordinary Joomla content component, allowing for multiple category levels, in contrast to the single section / category levels of Joomla; ACL control, allowing the creation of special permissions orientating on content control; Layout options, much more extensive options on controlling the exact layout. There are some of the key features of K2 and the ones which we will outline in some detail below. However, do note, the main avenue of help should be the JoomlaWorks site, as they are K2's developers.

Multiple Level Categories

A simple concept, but one vacant from the core Joomla content component. To understand the new feature, it is best to understand the limitations of the Joomla core. In Joomla, you can setup Sections, were you can have multiple child categories and in each category, you have your articles. In this setup, Sections are the top level grouping with sub-levels which are the categories, so this equates to two levels. Therefore, it should be apparent that there is severe limitations when it comes to deeper levels. You cannot, for example, have a Sports section with a category called Olympics then another subset, named Swimming and even another child group such as 200m Relays. With very large sites that have a main focus on content, this is a fatal weakness.

Luckily, K2 solves this concern by extending Joomla content beyond its current limits with effectively, unlimited level categories. The scenario outlined above pertaining to Sports sections / categories would be possible with K2, and incredibly easy to implement. This is a frequently requested feature in Joomla and K2 offers this functionality.

Setup

Creation of the multiple level categories is extremely easy, and any one familiar with the basics of Joomla will be home in the K2 dashboard. To access the Categories manager of K2, you need to login into the Joomla Administrator and go to Component → K2 → Categories. You will now be in the K2 Category Manager. From here, select the New button in the upper right of the screen to create a new category, simply setup the item to match your preferences. There are many more options than core Joomla here but only concern yourself with the basics for the purposes of multiple-level setup.

The primary focus is the Parent selectbox. From here, you can select which other category you wish for the one you are creating / editing to be a child / sub of. You can repeat this for all child items. Therefore, to echo the example above, you would create a Sports category as a top level item and Olympics you would set the parent as Sports and so on.

ACL Control

Joomla has several ACL types, these are essentially Public, Registered and Special. Special is sub-divided into the following roles, author, publisher, editor, manager, administrator and super administrator. However, the controls are quite limiting when it comes to advanced control over user activity. Although K2 is not an ACL solution, such as JACL, it does have advanced functions to allow you to control the competencies of K2, i.e. its content. With K2, you can create User Groups, where you can set which number of users have control over certain content items. For example, you may have 3 users who you wish to only create/edit in the Sports category on your site, out of 100 categories. K2 allows for this.

Go to Admin → Components → K2 → User Groups. From there, select New and setup your own group. You can set the controls that are typically assigned to the author, publisher, editor roles in Joomla but more diverse and interchangeable. For total ACL control, you will want to browse http://extensions.joomla.org

Configuration

K2 is a powerful component and has a plethora of options to configure the vast areas of the component. There are effectively 3 areas were you would want to control the specifics of the content, these are the Menu parameters, the Category parameters and singular Item parameters. In each area, there are many options to configure everything from author/creation date/modified date to the number of articles to appear per section, and how many per column and more layout controls pertaining to each row. Almost everything you would want to control from the comfort of the Joomla administrator are available to you.