Last week I posted how and where to check out which of our Joomla templates are compatible with Joomla 1.7 and today I thought I would point out that I have added a page where you can see which of our joomla templates are compatible with K2.

We have been diligently supporting K2 in our template releases since January 2009 and while the original claims were that K2 was Joomla 1.6 for Joomla 1.5, we think it's actually quite a lot more.

Why do you need K2 if Joomla 1.6 / Joomla 1.7 is here?

While Joomla 1.6 / Joomla 1.7 brought us acl, nested categories and other improvements, K2 offers (in my opinion) some key features in addition to these that are necessary for an all in one blogging / magazine publishing package.

Features like integrated author profile, latest comments modules, social links, image and video galleries are crucial for running and maintaining a blog. Certainly you can add some of these extra features to your Joomla site via other 3rd party offerings however K2 does this in a single package and within a single admin interface.

It looks like the folks over at Joomlaworks have been working over time with the latest incarnation of K2. Ive just checked the release notes and it looks like an incredible maturation of an already established component for Joomla. I cant wait to get my hands dirty with this one.

One thing I like about Joomlaworks' releases is their attention to detail and the new templating workflow looks like its going to save a lot of time when it comes to building overrides into our themes. The new version also has a new view which according to the notes will be perfect for magazine and portal layouts which is just in time for our July release of the Newstream Joomla template.

It may take a little while to go back through our catalogue but you can rest assured that all of the K2 Joomla templates that we have released will have all the necessary updates to work seamlessly with K2 v2.3. Im really looking forward to upgrading the blog here to v2.3 as well, but that will have to wait a little while as we get up to speed with our catalogue first.

You can download K2 for free from here.

While doing a bit of research into some K2 functionality recently, I came across a few posts on the K2 support forum requesting lists of templates and extensions that support the K2 component. We have been working pretty intimately with K2 since the start of this year and so I thought Id post a rundown of which of our Joomla templates and extensions that are K2 compatible.

We plan on adding K2 support to most of our future Joomla template releases and extending the Joomla modules that are currently K2 compatible as well. 

A few of you have been asking for more previews of the Grid2 Joomla template whose release is quite imminent, so I thought Id post a screenshot of the K2 Blog template that we are shipping with Grid2. Once again its a pretty simple blog type layout and the screenshot is using the minimal theme called white squares.

Ive just thrown the switch on a pretty major update to the captifyContent module. The biggest feature update is that the module is now K2 compatible. This means that you can use the captifyContent to display images from your k2 content items in a flexible and slick gallery-like module. Other features include more effective handling of layout parameters, lighter weight code for the actual captify effect, as well as the ability to specify article id's and K2 item id's so you can really fine tune which items are displayed in the gallery.

For more info and for the download please check out the main captifyContent page or stay tuned for the release of the Grid2 template in the next few days which features captify on the front page.

The more I work with the K2 component from Joomlaworks the more I am in awe of it. The templating engine for me is what drives the potential of this component because it effectively gives you the ability to create unlimited sub templates within a single Joomla template.

The advent of the template overrides in Joomla 1.5 was a real boon for template designers and developers because it meant that we could start overriding the core output from Joomla. This however is limited to a handful of "views" (eg blog category, frontpage etc) which soon becomes a little limiting if you want to start laying out a blog category in more than one way.