Hi,

I am new to joomla and am designing a site for an int'l organization, whose work is organized around working groups. The groups produce papers in several categories that I want to to upload and associate with groups. Also there will be news and events associated with the groups, or across groups, etc. Here are some basics of the structure I have in mind:

- Group pages: I guess these would be K2 items? Would I use categories or tags? On each group page, a user would see
[Description]
[News] - which can display not just on group category, but tags as well in order to capture news from other groups that have related news.
[Documents] - this would be a listing of the documents, which like news, could be common across several categories.
[doctype1] - list docs
[doctype2] etc

Right now the groups don't have many documents, so for now I just want the docs appearing on the group page without the user having to click on another page to see the group's docs.

[Events] - list of events for group, again, could be common across several groups


- Documents: I have been experimenting with phocadownload - this seems to organize the docs pretty well, but lack of module support and few plugins is making it tough to customize display and I just noticed that maybe K2 can do this natively? So there would be main doc page, with listing such as

[WG 1]
[doctype 1] list docs
[doctype 2] list docs
[WG 2]
[doctype 1] list docs
[doctype 2] list docs

There are times when a doc is solely for one group, such as a factsheet. Other times, there could be commonalities, but in this view I just want things categorized by group. Then the page would have a view switching option, so that one can also view by doc type:

[Doc type1] (e.g. fact sheets)
WG 1 Fact sheet
WG 2 Fact sheet
[Doc type2] (e.g. background paper)
WG1 background paper
WG2 background paper
etc

In general, I really don't know how to categorize docs to make above doable. Right now I have them in their own parent-child categorization, but this is making the linkage to groups tough... Should docs be a category, or should a working group be parent category and then have docs under there? Or would tags solve this?

- News: news is a category, but would display based on tags as well

- Events (using JEvents, but it does not seem to support event signup)


Front page would have latest news, with display options (slider, or news descriptions, etc)

Sidebars have several modules to display latest documents, events

I think K2 can do all this, just need some pointers. And if the component can't quite get the display how I want it, would I use K2 plugins?

Your guidance (and recommended extensions) is vastly appreciated.

Brian

I think the best way to handle the docs would be through K2 Attachments. Attach this doc to a corresponding item and the you need a second taxonomy. One that describes the doc. You can use K2's tags for that.

Thank you for the reply. And then I take it, if I want to have a documents page, K2 will allow me to create a page using the document tagging I used to create the taxonomy?

I have experimented with Attachments, but there is no way to tag attachments as far as I can tell, I mean tag an attachment that is in an item. Unless you mean, create a unique item that is itself an attachment. Ah, ok, maybe that is the trick!

thanks

You got Brian.

One item per attachment, and tag that item.

The only thing is, by doing it this way there will not be a straightforward way to list documents separately, for instance to have a menu item that takes one to

Docs
Fact Sheets
Working Group 1 Fact Sheet
Working Group 2 Fact Sheet
Papers
etc

This is what is driving me somewhat nuts...

Not really Brian,

You can create a menu item towards K2 tags or K2 Categories.
K2 items can also be included in menus but this is an overkill if you have a large number of docs.
You can list them using a K2 Content module instead.

Hi Krikor,

Is there a way to have it so that only a category AND a given tag are displayed? So otherwise, to display items that have category 1 AND tag 1.

By the way, are there existing content plugins so that I can do something in an item itself, like {loadk2content |id=2|someotherparam=value}

Thanks for helping me with all this!!!

Kind Regards,
Brian

Yes it can be done Brian.
Map this tag in a menu item and select the categories you want it to pull items from.

K2 does not offer any shortcodes but you can render other plugin's shortcodes inside its fulltext.