Anyone have an alternative to using K2? Extra Fields is a failure. The problems are many, plus the lack of developer's documentation for K2. K2 doesn't follow the developer's excellent attitude we have grown to enjoy in the Joomla community. Extra Fields is a collection of sub-fields and can't be accessed as regular MySQL, thus it makes handling of the data very cumbersome and extremely slow. Everything else in Joomla such as grid.sort, for example, expects data to be in regular MySQL fields. But K2 stuffs all your fields into a single Extra Field. It should have been a tip-off from the start when you can either show or hide Extra Fields, but can't select which ones to show, plus the lack of control over them. I am most certainly not alone in seeing this problem considering the lack of a solution to this problem offered by professional 3rd-party software developers.

Instead of using K2, I'm considering adding an additional MySQL table to store the fields having them associated with the Joomla Articles. This way things would work more elegantly. If anyone has already done this or knows of a good product that already addresses this, please let me know. I'm asking here because I can see by all the postings there are many others frustrated with K2 and hoping they would share their solutions with this all. Maybe when there is a major re-write of K2 and it drops the Extra Fields problem, it will warrant another consideration. Thanks!

I have used Extra Fields for many applications, e.g. a business directory (no need for SOBI), a plant encyclopedia, wine catalog with tasting notes, and they work great. I am not crazy about the data model, but keeping the one-to-many relation (all EF data in one row) does make sense.

For an alternative, expanded version of EF, you can look at Sherpa:
www.jiliko.net/extensions/k2-sherpa.html

Unfortunately, it's still for 1.5 only - we're waiting for the upgrade..

Embedding data in Joomla articles would seem to be a step backwards. With some creativity, you could instead use a tool like Fabrik to quickly create/populate your own data tables and then do stuff with that data wherever you wish, including inside K2.

Take a lake a look also at the NoNumber suite - sourcerer is a nifty tool that lets you run native data routines inside content, incl. K2.

Otherwise - we look forward to seeing your improvements!
Cheers,
Alan

@Edward Coast

K2 was designed that way. Extra fields are meant to add extra information. Not structure. If you however need to store extra information to seperate fields you can build a K2 plugin. Such a plugin can define additional inputs in the K2 form and also can manipulate the data as desired using the onK2AfterSave plugin event.