I'm brand new to Joomla. And even newer to K2. My web design company has been using Business Catalyst (BC) for a while to create our customer's websites. BC has a feature they call "web apps" that accomplishes very similar functionality to K2. To be honest, it's a lot easier to  use though. Here is a tutorial from BC's forum that explains what web apps are and how you can customize them: kb.worldsecuresystems.com/868/cpsid_86860.html?bc-partner.

 

Here's my question. Let's say that I want to put together a real estate website using K2. Like any real estate website, you will probably have the property name (address), a picture, the property description, number of bedrooms, number of baths, etc. By default, K2 does not offer most of those fields, except the name field and the description. So those would need to be extra fields that are added to the K2 category.

 

On my home page, I want to pull in a list of the most recently added properties. But I DON'T want anything but a thumbnail of the larger picture and the name of the property to show up. However, on all of the interior pages of my website, in the right column, I want the same recent properties to show up, except I want to show a little more information, in a different format, but not everything. So maybe the picture shows up (larger thumbnail) and then under that the property name and then the number of bedrooms.

 

If someone clicks on the property name, in any of these lists of properties, it will take the visitor to the full (or "detailed") listing.

 

So my questions are 1) Can multiple lists be created of the same K2 category information, but have different information show up in each list? If that's possible, how? 2) Can the positioning of all the item elements be customized? Let's say I want, in the detail view, the picture to be big and to the left and then all of the other information to be placed on the right (or visa versa)? Is that possible? If so, how?

 

I'm just trying to determine if Joomla, coupled with K2, can accomplish the same thing that I'm used to doing with BC.

Thanks in advance!

To all your questions the answer is YES.

Let's start with your first question: K2 gives you the option to have different layouts for the same category. The one is done in the category parameters and the other in the menu item parameters. There, in the menu item, you can override, let's say the category's up to a point and use a different layout.

 

Moving on to the second question: You can position everything as you like. All blocks that you see either in the category list or in the item are located in the template files of the component. You can use as many templates as you want, as long as you create a template override, read here.