K2 | The powerful content extension for Joomla! developed by JoomlaWorks

Hi everyone. I'm Antonio Mercurio from Italy. I'm passioned about opensource software such as Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress and many others. I made a video course on K2 for Joomla 3 in Italian on the Udemy platform. The video course is composed of 12 videos and the first 3 are free. The duration is about 150 minutes and you can learn the basics of the component. In the future I'll post new bonus videos and whoever is interested can visit the link below:

https://www.udemy.com/corso-k2/ More

Ciao a tutti. Sono Antonio Mercurio dall'Italia. Per passione mi occupo di realizzare guide in formato e-book disponibili su Amazon e Google Play Store e di videoguide su youtube. Volevo informare la comunità di K2 che ho realizzato un videocorso su questo componente nella verisone 2.6.9 su Joomla 3- Il videocorso è disponibile per soli 5 euro su udemy e i cui primi tre video sono free. Il corso si compone di 12 video per la durata totale di 150 minuti. Copre tutte le basi del componente ma verrà arricchito in futuro se avrà un certo numero di iscritti. Per chi fosse interessato ecco il link di udemy:

https://www.udemy.com/corso-k2/ More

A quick background to Joomla

Most modern websites use a Content Management System (CMS) such as Wordpress or Joomla. The main advantage of a CMS is that it gives the website owner the freedom to blog and create their own content without the help (and costs) of a web design agency.

Whilst a CMS gives some of the power back to the website owner by allowing them to produce and manage their own website content, there are a few very important rules to respect when creating your own articles and modifying existing website content, which we will discuss in this post.

At Jeyjoo our CMS of choice is Joomla as we believe it is the most flexible and powerful content management system.

What is K2?

K2 is a content platform for Joomla. It's also ideal for blogging. As many of our clients use K2 for blogging, and there is no guide out there written specifically for bloggers and website owners, I thought it best to write one.

A Bloggers Guide to Content Creation in Joomla k2

Once you are up and running with your own Joomla website, and feel ready to start blogging (or creating content as it is now fashionably called), follow these rules to get the most out of your website, boost your website visits from search engines, and avoid making the common K2 mistakes.

Getting started with K2

• Log on to your Joomla Admin Panel. You can usually access this by inserting the url www.mysite.com/administrator/ into your web browser (make sure you substitute your actual domain in for mysite.com)
• From the main menu select "components" / "K2" / "items" ("items" is just the confusing K2 term for what is otherwise known as a blog, article or webpage). Note - please leave all other options in the K2 menu untouched unless you have web development knowledge or have been told otherwise by your web agency.
• You will now see a screen with a list of all of blog items on your website. From this screen you can add new items; edit any existing items, publish/ un-publish items, and even delete items should you need to.
• For the purpose of this tutorial, we will create a new item (blog) - so click on the "New" button.
• Now you can write your K2 item and make any edits using the detailed instructions below.
• Once finished make sure you click "Save and close". Otherwise the item will remain locked and other website administrators will be unable to access it.

The compulsory fields in a K2 blog

1. Title

Add a Title that clearly describes what your blog item is about. If you want to optimize your new blog for search, then your chosen keyword/ key phrase should be included in the Title.

2. Title Alias (URL)

When you first save your item, the Title alias (URL) will auto-complete based on the Title you created, so you don't actually need to touch this field. Here are a few simple and very important rules to follow when creating a Title alias (URL):

• The Title alias (URL) will be the link to your new blog page. Once your blog goes live, the Title alias (URL) should NEVER be changed, otherwise you will lose your social shares, backlinks from other websites to your article plus any potency that the page has achieved in search engines rankings such as Google.
• The page URL (or link) should be descriptive, pertinent to the k2 article and human readable (ie. without funny characters and symbols). If you have any doubts at all, just make sure that the URL is identical to your item Title.

3. Category

When creating your website, your webmaster will have set up a selection of K2 Categories. The Category is an extremely powerful field that dictates in which section of your website the blog item will show up. Changing the Category field will move the item to a different section of the website.

In general once a blog is live you will never want to change the Category as it could upset your page links. If your item has been published for more than a few days, always check with your web agency before changing the Category field.

4. Published

Publish is a straight-forward yes/no field that will publish or un-publish your K2 blog item. If you want to remove an item from your website simply set this field to No. You can revert back to "published" whenever you want.

5. Content

The content tab is where you write the text for your new page.

We are now in the world of Web 3.0 and the Semantic web. Realistically if you want your K2 blog item to rank well on Google, then we advise a minimum of 1000 words, and ideally around 2000 word of high quality, informative copy. Simply put, if there are better pages out there on the web covering the same subject, then you will struggle rank well and get new visitors from Google (which is usually the main writing a blog).

A word of warning about using the Text Editor:

• Keep use of the Text Editor buttons to an absolute minimum.
• Applying bold, underline, italics and headers to the article is time consuming and your site will not be uniform.
• Any good web designer will have built your website using a central graphic override file called a .css or .less file. From here they will be able to control the look of your entire website in a few seconds - rather than you going through every single page to make a graphic change.
• Controlling the graphics from the central graphic override file will ensure that your website has a consistent professional look throughout.
• Although you cannot see it, text editors often adding lots of unnecessary code to your page, making your website slower to load, and harder for Google to rank.

6. The Image tab

Although technically not compulsory, adding an image to each blog item is a wise idea. The truth is that although we shouldn't judge a book by its cover, we all do! Choosing a striking image that reflects your blog will work wonders for your article especially on social networks. Looking for free images? Try these free stock image websites.

7. Meta Description

Open the Meta information tab and click on the Description field. The Description is what will show up in Google search listings.

Use your Description to elaborate on your page title and give your potential audience a better idea of what will be on the page when they click. A typical search results page has 10 website listings, so a well written Description will ensure your website stands out and will improve your click-through-rate. Try and describe exactly what your page is about using superlative terms and even the odd UPPERCASE word to give your page a competitive advantage.

Google shows 150 - 160 characters (including spaces) of a page's description (aka meta description tag). If your Description exceeds 160 characters it will be truncated.

8. The Image Button

Use the image button (found directly below the Text Editor) to add images into your K2 blog item. First of all, click within the item text exactly where you want the image to appear, hit the "Image button", and a pop-up window will appear.

• You have the option to either select the image directly from your server or upload from your computer.
• Align image to left or right
• In the Image Description field add a short sentence that describes what is in the image. As Google cannot see your image, it will use this description to enhance it's understanding of your page - this can help improve your search ranking.

How to edit a K2 item in Joomla

Editing a K2 item is similar to creating a new item as outlined above:

• Log on to your Joomla Admin Panel
• From the main navigation menu select "components" / "K2" / "items"
• Instead of hitting the new button, click on the item you want to edit.
• Make changes to your K2 item, following the guidelines above.
• Once your item (blog) is live, never change the Title alias (url) field or Category unless otherwise instructed by your web agency.

Tl;nr

• The Title field should explain clearly what your K2 item is about
• A catchy, well written Title and Meta description are hugely important factor in boosting your website visits. Better titles and descriptions will improve your we website click-through rate from search engine rankings
• Once you blog item is live, NEVER change the Title Alias (url) or the Category fields
• If in doubt, the Title Alias (url) should be the same as your Title
• Keep use of the text editor to an absolute minimum, leaving all graphic aspects to your web designer

Final thoughts

I hope our Bloggers Guide to K2 has been beneficial and that you will go on to use it. If you found it useful, please share with other Joomla website owners using the social buttons provided. We love to hear your comments, so if you have any questions or feedback, please let us hear it.

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Now the social sharing become more powerful with Social Booster, total shares for each content, a super simple and fast way to let your visitors share your content, images, and social booster nav-share bar let user not to loose share buttons while scrolls page and its offers unlimited possibilities with shortcodes first time ever in Joomla. More

We would like to offer you the perfect tool to create advanced custom content with minimal effort or even without any knowledge how to code HTML - YT Shortcode.

The shortcode is small bits of code that supports users to create special formatted-style content easily than ever. All you need to do is install, the YT Shortcode button will be appeared in Editor bar of Joomla K2, Joomla Content as well as in Custom HTML module, and this allows you to choose shortcode for your content quickly. That is truly easy, right?

YT Shortcode was considered the highly feature that included in YT Framework v2.0. And now this plugin can be used independently without YT Framework. This plugin supports more than 24 amazing shortcodes, you can freely create beautiful and complex content.

Let's check YT Shortcode tour right now to feel more!
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obGrabber adapter for K2 will add K2 support to obGrabber extension to post K2 items automatically from outside sources such as: RSS, XML, ebay, amazon etc. More

DJ-MediaTools is a extension for Joomla 3 and 2.5

It gives the opportunity to create slides or albums with images, Vimeo/Youtube videos, articles, DJ-Catalog2 products, DJ-Classifieds ads,
K2 items or Joomla content/articles and put them into articles, modules or create detached component views.

All items ( images,videos,articles) will be displayed in attractive way.
DJ-MediaTools works well with responsive templates.

Latest 2.0.2 version of DJ-MediaTools extension brings the K2 support. It means that K2 items can be used as a source of DJ-MediaTools Albums.

The K2 Items plugin allows to:
- select whole categories or specific items
- order items
- set items ordering rule
- show/hide/display featured items
- set the time range ( for "most popular" or "most commented")
- fetch items with media only
- set default image More

Are you finding the plugin which helps you load more items? There's not more waiting. Today, we're pleased to announce that SJ Listing Ajax for K2 has been released. The plugin supports to insert Load more button in item-list view of K2 Component. This helps load items on the font-end just by clicking on Load more button without reloading its page.

SJ Listing Ajax for K2 supports Ajax to load more items, this is very flexible in config the number of items that are loaded more. This plugin is developed for K2 component and compatible with Joomla! 2.5 and 3.x. Please visit our demo to see how nice the plugin works.

#	Main Features
1.	Made for K2 component
2.	Allow to set the number of items to be shown per load items
3.	Support to set path of template
4.	Support to show/hide pagination
5.	Allow to include jQuery

List Templates are using:

1. SJ Vinda

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Convenient and easy to use, Folk Gallery allows website owners to present multiple images on K2 items by utilising a sleek gallery format.

Folk Gallery allows you to engage with your readers, while also aiding your site to achieve a better Google ranking. By utilising the "responsive" popup engines, you can also make the viewing experience better with touch support for navigating between images. Excellent for News, Portfolio, blogs, e-commerce portals. More

* This is a Module for joomla 2.5 and 3.x

• The Module support to show K2 item's images ( K2 component ) or folder's images.
• You can control many part of slideshow, show them or not, it belong to you.
• You can select theme (5 theme), control part on it. It support many amazing animation (38 animations).

* Work nice on all browsers.

* Show aticles's images:

• Source: Select items from category or specific items.
• Category: Selects Articles from one or more Categories. If no selection will show all categories as default.
• Count: The number of Articles to display (the default is 5).
• Featured Articles: Show/Hide Articles designated as Featured.
• Order: Select article with order.

* Module configs:

• Select Themes: Give you 5 theme of Skitter.
• Image's width & Image's height: Set size for image to resize, it is slideshow's size too.
• Select Resize Type: You chose how articles's image is resized.
• Get Images From: Help you select image in an article to show (Full article image, intro image and intro text).
• Select Animation: Select animation you like (38 animations supported).
• Auto Play: Slidehow auto play or not.
• Show Controls: Show or hode control (Play & Stop button).
• Controls position: Where you want show control.
• Show Dots: Show pagiantion like dots (hover on dots will show thumb image).
• Easing: You can select one in many easing effects.
• Focus: Enable it and click to focus icon your slideshow will display on popup (it's nice!).
• Focus position: Where you want Focus icon display.
• Fullscreen: If you want slideshow display full screen.
• Hide all tools: It will all tools when display but will appear when mouseover tools.
• Interval: Speed change images.
• Show Lable: Show label or not.
• Label animation: Select animation for label (left, right, slideup, fixed).
• Show Navigation: Show next and preview button?
• Show number: Ahow pagination as number.
• Number align: Align for number.
• Show Preview: Show Preview buntton in navigation?
• Show Progessbar: Display Progessbar or not.
• Show random: Order display images is random or not.
• Stop when over: Slideshow will stop when mouseover or not.
• Show thumbs: Show thumb image or not.
• Velocity animation: Speed for animation.
• XML file: Path of XML file to load image and content. Eg: http://yourdomain/data/slides.xml - You can find demo for xml file in this module's assets/xml folder

Another our modules for K2:

BM Nice Slideshow Res For K2
BM Slider For K2
BM Flip Master For K2
BM Smooth Slideshow For K2
BM Accordion for K2
BM Top For K2

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