Brent Friar has put it 100% where i'm coming from too.

If I only had a few small local business owners to keep happy maybe I could wing-it but i'm 'lucky' enough to work for some larger clients and I just don't have the luxury of waiting either...

 

Off to Zoo it is then (for now at least).

and I'm off to Wordpress :D

Been playing with it this morning too... Seems to work nicely ;-)

Warrick van den Heever said:
Hey guys need to share this with the whole K2 community. ZOO in j1.7 Rocks. Might not be for everyone but it is stable and works out the box and has great documentation!!!!! I recon if more people support Zoo their product will become better and better. Yay a cck that works!!!

Hi Guys,

In the same boat as many of you. I am a Joomla template and extensions developer who has invested a lot of time an effort into K2. Our website is using K2 and we have 5 commercial extensions and 1 free extension for K2. We also designed a few templates around K2. As someone in this thread said, it once was the holy grail and we thought we were staying ahead of the game by supporting it. We recently updated all of our extensions and templates to be 1.7 compatible. Only K2 and Virtuemart extensions are left and I am getting nervous. We recently developed an awesome K2 extension called K2 expander which uses AJAX to present K2 items in a cool way. (This shows that I was confident in K2 moving forward) I was hoping, by the time I was ready to use it (now) on our newest template, K2 would be ready. It is not. I am stuck here, hoping K2 will finally get going. Maybe it is time to scrap K2 and convert our extensions to work with ZOO? I wish I didn't have to write that.....

Is Zoo really a CCK?  Seems like you need to download an APP in order to get anywhere.  You can't really create your own fields unless they are already defined by the APP.  It's like a flexible bubble, but you can't burst out.  Of course if they had more APPs for any occasion then my whole argument would mean nothing.

Actually Joomla 1.7 stable is out. What he means is to install J 1.7 and then install the K2 v2.5 (beta)

Hi Warrick

Thanks for the info. Following this thread I installed Zoo the other day. So far I have only had time for a quick look... I intend to did deeper in the next few days, but you have already helped me think I have made the right choice (or PILL as someone suggested in reference to the choice made in the matrix).

Despite some valid opinions here, I personally just don't have time to wait or mess about 'hoping'.

I just wish K2 was not falling behind and now I can see that (like you?) I will probably end up using Zoo in future and bin this once great system. Shame

My advice (for what it's worth) to the developers is sadly simplistic: Life isn't fair: Evolve or die.

 

Warrick van den Heever said:

Well you roll it up into a ball and throw it at the screen really hard! To soft and it won't work. :) the harder the better!

I have used zoo for 2 days now. It comes with a pic gallery, video, google maps etc. etc. Its stable! And you don't have to throw it that hard. I have completed a whole site using it and it works really well. K2 is not the only cck out there.

Seblod is quite good too but requires the largest learning curve. They inform their community of developments, though not always meeting deadlines they do show that they care and have a great forum for questions etc. It does everything K2 does and much more! Its free and you don't need to subscribe (even though the site makes you think you do). They are free too!

Both Seblod and Zoo are good alternatives to K2 and seem to be going forward in the right direction. Learning curve is a bit larger than K2 but well worth it in the end.

Geoffrey said:

How do I throw svn at 1.7 beta? William White said:
Try throwing the svn at 1.7 beta and see what happens. i think i saw a post somewhere where it was working...but all beta beta beta....

I think you're so right...

It's such a shame though because K2 was once the holy grail of joomla functionality (to me). It firmly put Joomla above Wordpress as the choice for me when working on many client sites that had the 'newspaper' feel etc. Wordpress is great (before anyone thinks I'm taking a shot - I use it all the time). Now however, as far a Joomla is concerned, it seems I must reluctantly move on in my choices... rather than instal an OUT OF DATE Joomla just to make this work.
Warrick van den Heever said:

I'm not sure if they read these posts. I know if I had a product I would be defending my decisions. They do make money on K2. Joomlaworks sell the accessories(Gallery pro, K2mart, SuperBlogger).

The silence is defeaning..

 

I got flamed in another thread for asking for info on the 1.7 realease but as others have said, if you use K2 for client sites, it really is time to get worried because decisons have to be made about which path to go down.

 

I love K2, it's fantastic and I desperately want to stay with it and would pay money for a stable realase for 1.7

 

Just need to know some info.. if it's not working out or the changes are too great in the 1.7 codebase, then fair enough but at least let us know!

It's in release candidate status. Start using it now and update to the final when it arrives, ok?

That's fantastic , all we wanted to hear :)

Where do we get it from? the download still says svn version?

its not fair simply because of the big push template providers gave to k2 .. and joomlaworks still encourge template providers to support k2, check most big template providers .. they all have support for k2 .. and they are 1.7 compatible where k2 is still 1.6 beta .. if my template providers ( rockettheme and joomlart ) support it next month im going to scream in their forums ..they really need to support comapnies who are up to date and care about its customers .. 80 replies and no answer from moderators say a lot to me :)

Well I've put it on a 1.7 site and although I've not done a massive amount yet, it seems very stable to me

Hi Mark

is that a live/client site though or a test site?

i think the issue here is that nobody is answering with any confidence and reassuring us that our investment in time and effort will be rewarded with an up-to-date and useable (production envirnment) site that we could knowingly suggest is the best way forward for clients (our reputation).

As you will note if you have read back through the posts (many of us are BIG fans/users of K2) but we're feeling jittery as there is not real response to Joomla 1.6 after 6 months and Fotis said originially he was NOT going to support it.

 

Now we are at 1.7 and still no SOLID information. i for one would love to carry on with K2 because I love it AND don't have time currently to play with Zoo (for example). But NO response is NOT good enough in my opinion and does not instil faith.

 

Mark Foster said:

Well I've put it on a 1.7 site and although I've not done a massive amount yet, it seems very stable to me

Site i'm currently building for a client, only a straight forward one so ideal for trying it out whilst putting it together

 

Not had any problems so far other than the layout being a bit skewed in admin parameters but that's just a css issue with the default 1.7 admin template I think

I have Joomla 1.7 and K2 v2.5 (SVN) installed without any issues, i'm actually working on a clients site in localhost. I'm adding all the articles again and so far have not had any issues. Just that if i use the default Joomla template, the K2 image and social sharing icons alignment breaks, and the admin area parameters is misaligned. Refer to the screenshot attached.

Thanks Mark/Kannan

This gives me a more confidence... But if it works Ok I'm still left wondering why no announcements...

 

i have just aquired a small site for an old client that wants to test a market... i may just go for it and see what happens. I'm still going to look at Zoo though now. just in case.

There is no free multilanguage support for ZOO. I had to hack it myself to make it work. I want to ditch ZOO as soon as possible, for K2 or Seblod. Seblod is getting better English documentation and I hope K2 will, too. ZOO has great documentation so it was the fastest to get up and running. K2 frontend editing and login remains a mystery to me.

I got my head around every last bit of K2 to make this site - www.corriecountdown.co.uk which has been a great success with over 3000 pages of content and 100,000 visitors a month. K2 handles it all perfectly.

Managed to write a custom plugin it for it that automatically creates user groups for a new user and places them in it after registration wth the correct posting permissions.

I looked at Zoo originally but couldn't get my head around the code in comparison to K2

It was so easy to modify which is why I've used it on all client sites since.