I am using K2 for Joomla 1.5 to design a website for a client. While I designed for Joomla for quite some time, this is the first site I am building with K2. I particularly like its ability to handle multiple image thumbnails for different layouts. However, I am having difficulty in creating my homepage layout.

Click here to take a look at my site as currently designed.

I have set my homepage to render a category layout listing multiple categories (all of them) and showing only those items marked "featured." This seems to give me what I want, with one major problem.

The parameters of an item are based on category. Most of my categories have identical parameters. They show the title but hide most other options like creation date, author, ratings, category, etc. For most pages on the site, I want to see a title, image, and content. That is all.

But on the blog portion of the website, I would like to see the title, author, creation date, rating, category, comments, and maybe others. I can easily set this up in the "blog" category parameters, and on the blog page, it shows up properly.

My problem now is on the homepage. Since some of the content I will feature on the homepage is from the blog, with one set of options, and some from other categories with a different set of options, the items to do not line up nicely on the homepage category listing. Take a look at my website for example . There are featured stories in a three column layout. The first two show up as I desire, with just a title, image, and story. However, the third story, which comes from the blog category, shows the creation date, author, and rating as well, which messes up the look and feel of the page.

Is there anyway I can get items to list on a category layout from more than one category in a uniform fashion, without having to set up all categories to use the exact same parameters?

I hope I am making myself clear. And I would appreciate any help in the matter.