If you’re an avid reader of our blog, you will probably know that we love K2 – no – make that we’re in love with K2. It just makes our lives much easier and happier: we can extend it, we can easily migrate from one version of K2 to another, it doesn’t suffer from the performance issues that Joomla’s core content management suffer from, and it just has so many amazing built-in features! It also doesn’t use the #__assets table, which makes moving the K2 content from one website to another much easier. We did cover, in details, why K2 is better for content management than Joomla’s own core here.
Now, let’s move on to the actual point of this post…
This last weekend, we were commissioned to implement a solution for a company on its Joomla website. In short, the company needed to add content to its website related to healthcare. “Easy!”, you might be thinking! “They can just add Joomla articles!”. Well, there’s more to it – they actually needed to have additional fields and display those additional fields in different colors. “Still, it’s very easy”, you might say, “they can just add those fields to every article and give a different CSS style to each”. That can be done, but it wasn’t what they wanted. They didn’t want the people adding content to go through the hassle of explicitly specifying a CSS class for those many extra fields, since the people doing that work weren’t that technical and they were afraid of ending up with inconsistency issues when it comes to the look & feel. Additionally, they wanted to be able to hide/show these extra fields on demand (yes, it can be done through CSS, but it wouldn’t look good to the search engines if a substantial portion of the page is hidden using display: none).
Thankfully, K2’s Extra Items came to the rescue. If you don’t know what those Extra Items are, let us explain: Extra Items are, in short, K2’s own way to allow you to add additional fields to the form in the backend, and to display those fields on the frontend. For example, in our project, we added the following fields to the Medicine K2 category:
- Category: Which is a drop down of different categories of available medicine.
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Available since: A date field (self-explanatory).
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FDAA approved on: A date field (also self-explanatory).
As you can see, those additional fields make it much easier to add the necessary information about a medicine, to display it differently on the frontend, and to export it to a different system should the need arise. We were able to finish the whole job in 5 days (we finished on Wednesday), other companies have quoted 2 months (and more) for the very same job (as we were told by the IT Manager). Yes – it might take 2 months if you want to develop those forms from scratch, but, since we have leveraged the power of K2’s Extra Items, we finished the job in just 5 days!
But are they perfect?
Well, nothing is perfect, and that includes (or excludes? This is probably a very advanced question for Grammar Scientists…) K2’s Extra Items. Here’s why:
- The fact that you need to assign them to only one Extra Item Group and then assign that group to a category can lead to redundancy issues. So, if you want 3 different extra items from 3 different groups for a category you will need to re-create the items, and then re-create another Extra Item Group, and then assign that group to the category.
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You can’t add a description for the Extra Fields. Not really the end of the world, but for those who are entering the data, it can be quite annoying before they get used to the system and memorize what each field is about.
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The associated data is stored in a json encoded format in the database, which means that you will need to decode those values, prior to using them, using the json_decode. This, of course, is not an issue when displaying those extra fields on the website. But, if you want to search by Extra Fields, it can be a bit hard and performance may not be that great. This can be a major issue if the search functionality is critical to your website (then again, there’s a solution for anything Joomla, at least at itoctopus!).
If you intend on using K2’s Extra Items on your website and you’re a bit hesitant, then don’t! We can’t recommend them highly enough. And, if you need help using them to implement a solution, then please give us a call or shoot us an email. We’re always available, we’re very hard workers, we produce high-quality code, and our rates are among the most affordable in our industry!