Hi, I guess this question shows that I haven’t really understood Joomla and K2, anyway here it is: what is the relationship between K2 and normal joomla templates?
In other words, I’m trying to build my first site with joomla and K2 and I want to choose a template. Can I download just any template that is compatible with joomla 1.7? Is there some overlapping between the features of a template and K2 features / settings or they control a completely separated set of characteristics of the site?

You need to find a template that is K2 compatible. Once you have downloaded and installed it you will find all the K2 template files in yoursite/templates/template_name/html/com_k2/templates and in yoursite/templates/template_name/css.

There is some very helpful information on how to create a template override on the Community. I'm not an expert but with the help of the info here I've been able to create template overrides successfully.

Good Luck

Thank you Debbie,
actually I'm not sure that what you said is completely true.
I have downloaded a template that didn't say it was K2 compatible and I can't find a directory named come_k2 under yoursite/templates/template_name/html, but it seems to work anyway.
There are a few things that I've not figured out how to do, but the basic structure of the site is working.
So I'm still confused, maybe someone else would like to add some information?

k2 is a component so the items and categories will show where your ordinary joomla template has its component output.
in your template it would look like <jdoc:include type="component" />
so basically k2 will show fine in any joomla template
its only when you want to start changing the style of k2 and its output that you would need to start worrying about creating files in templates/yourtemplate/html/k2/
the templates with these files already created have simply defined their own particular styles for k2.


hope that makes sense and is helpful.

ps k2 has its own set of templates for the different views (templates everywhere!! lol)
these are the files you would copy to the directory above.