Hi Aaron & everyone

could you explain your solution more in detail?

My structure is: Category a -> Subcategory a -> Item a; but item a is also part of category c. I can call category c over the menu via TAG but as far as I understood k2 I cannot call Tags via the category. By this I mean that users that are in category c will see items of category c but not items by tags belonging to c.

Does your solution solve this problem? If so an explanation would be much appreciated. Still very interested in multicategories.

have a nice day and thanks!

I would love to have multiple categories as well but from everything I have read in my ventures across the interwebs... I have found that multiple categories can wreak havoc on SEO... Beside that and actually more important to me is compatibility.
I have been around Joomla long enough to know that relying on one extension could box me in so I am wary about just installing something to get functionality I think I need.

With all that said, I chose K2 - primarily because it is a strong community, great extension and seems to get upgraded VERY fast to keep up with the newest Joomla. (Over the last couple of years I had developed using Mighty Extensions which is still stuck on Joomla 1.5 with 1.7 compatibility being released in July).

So now I have K2... I would love multiple categories because my items need to be somewhat interlinked. So here is what I did:


1. Created MAIN categories for what the item actually is. For example:
- Songs
- Artists
- Labels
A song is a song and cannot be an artist and an artist cannot be a label,etc.. so it works right?
2. I needed something to interconnect features of the items within the categories.. For Example
- Song has an Artist which I TAG and a Label which I TAG
- Artist has the Artist TAG (shows up in same results as the song with same tag)
3. I actually use extra fields that I have customized to link directly to the tag

In summary - I may end up have hundreds of tags but only my 3 major categories. I realized I did not need multiple categories for each item when I can simply use multiple tags and customized templates.

Hope this helps!

Hi Aaron & everyone again.

Thanks for the explanation. I found it helpful and know structures like this. You are right you can do real cool things with tags like show e.g. a “case study” using related items for one item in a business website etc.

However my problem is different: Let’s take your categories – Songs, Artists and Labels. I have the same structure but a 4th category “Genre=Rock”. It includes items that belong to the previous categories and still could be independent and are a kind of “search result + own content”.
Until now I could identify two ways of displaying the 4th category with its items
1) I simply duplicate the item and save it under two categories (this is bad for SEO)
2) I introduce the TAG “Rock” which works fine, but the item by tag list only shows using a menu item (Menu K2 Tags).

If I have the category list view (Songs, Artists, Labels & ROCK) the category link does not trigger the tag view but shows 0 items in the category.

One way could be to create a new template for the category ROCK and have a php statement for tags “Rocks”. If anyone has an idea how to make it a clean PHP statement suggestions are welcome.
But in my understanding this is more into the core of K2 than a simple template modification since with three genres I already have 4 templates and so on which is confusing on large sites (and even smaller ones) since I am not really changing the layout. It is just the other way around, since I want all categories to look alike in this case.

Any suggestions or a plugin or do I simply stop seeing the forest in front of to many trees (in case I apologize)?
Take care and thanks

I realy need this features too (multiple categories).

Some persons says that it's bad for SEO because of the duplicate content on different URL. But if you use some other CMS like Prestashop for online shopping system, you can see that they use a good system : you can choose for an item a "main category" and also display in "other category". Very nice and this can be usefull for K2 I think...

Thanks ;-)

Any news on the progress of the component under development that you're referring too Andrian? Would be nice to have it and a lot of people are willing to pay for it. Some of us are pretty desperate for multiple categories.. :unsure:

Hello everyone,

Yes I agree that multi categories would be great. Like Adrian I'm working on a new website for our music company that consists of 2 labels each having their own catalog (artists + songs) and would like to show all of them in one main view and sub-views each having their own templates.

I thought I was able to do this but found out today that linking to menu category item types isn't working well with this kind of site set up :(
See my post here: getk2.org/community/New-to-K2-Ask-here-first%21/10757-menu-categories-doesnt-use-correct-url-

I heard one of the K2 developers mention in a video where he gave a presentation that they are planning to implement multiple categories... but haven't seen any updates about it unfortunately.

So yes, I vote all for the multi category functionality!

Best, Iris

Look what I found :)

dvlancer.com/blog/1/27-adding-multiple-categories-option-part-2.html

and this one is for version 2.5.4 dvlancer.com/blog/1-blog/28-updated-k2-files-for-multiple-categories-for-version-254.html

Don't know if it will work but will definitely check it out now.

Did it work? I note some comments that put me off it a bit.

Iris wrote: Don't know if it will work but will definitely check it out now.

I'm interested to know if it worked for you as well :)


I released a new multiple categories patch for K2 version 2.5.7 with some improvements over version 2.5.4. A download link can be found here: dvlancer.com/blog/1-blog/31-multiple-categories-update-for-k2-version-257.html

Eoin wrote: I note some comments that put me off it a bit.

Most of those issues were caused by incorrect version of K2 when applying multi categories patch. The new patch is for K2 version 2.5.7 Only. It will not work on any other version of K2. A lot of people managed to miss this point.

Please let me know if it works for you.