Random Stuff by Grehund

Over the last 2 years, I have been involved in developing a few Joomla websites. The sites have varied in their design layout, content and function. All have implemented excellent templates created by the guys over at RocketTheme.com.

In July 2009, they introduced their Affinity template sporting a third-party extension from JoomlaWorks.gr called K2.

K2 was JoomlaWorks’ answer to WordPress. It was a major enhancement to the entire Joomla CMS, both front and back-end. It was set to make Joomla a more compelling option for bloggers, so naturally I was interested.

Being the early adopter that I am, I set to work including K2 in my latest Joomla website. It has been a headache ever since!

Whilst K2 has introduced some over-due features to the Joomla CMS, it seems the author(s) has given little consideration to K2’s true flexibility. K2 was meant to be more flexible than Joomla, but in reality it’s not. Allowing a user to create custom fields is not enough to call it flexible.

Maybe the story would be different if the guys at JoomlaWorks were of any help when it came to troubleshooting. Just browse the JoomlaWorks or K2 forums and you will find tales of frustration at every turn. You’re lucky if you receive any response from a JoomlaWorks member at all!

On top of the lack of flexibility and poor support, K2 has introduced some unwelcome “features” to the Joomla CMS too. Specifically, the “blog calendar” and “tag cloud”. Have a look at some WordPress blogs implementing these features and ask yourself just how useful they are.

My fellow blogger, Jeff Attwood, wrote an excellent piece titled Thirteen Blog Clichés, back in 2007, addressing the uselessness of these and other “features” of blogs. So it begs the question, how in-touch with current web trends are the guys over at JoomlaWorks?

Use the K2 extension from JoomlaWorks at your own peril. My advice; stick to individual extensions that do 1 task really well. Stay clear of any all-singing-all-dancing extensions, unless you really enjoy bad musicals.

Image Source: flickr