Hello to all of you,

I am planning to collect news clips, from various sources, in order to provide various viewpoints on certain ongoing topics. Thus I was considering using an enhanced weblink tool, to sort, collect, rate, search, etc. the links to the related articles. If this projects flies, I would expect to generate a volume of about 2000 links a year.

I stepped over the K2 component already a while ago, but I've never really used it. Thus I wonder if it would be advisable / if it would make sense to use the component K2, as such a weblink tool, to provide enhanced features, e.g.:

- Language
- Description (teaser, summery of an article, etc.)
- Date (date of publication)
- Weblink (this might be a tricky part, as I want to jump directly to the underlying target URL and not to an "article")
- Hits
- Tags
- embedded graphics (picture of a related article)
- Source (... of the displayed information, scroll down list)
- comments (allows users to leave a comment on this topic)
- Like Buttons (e.g. Item rating star)

I would very much appreciate your feed back.

B/rgds

Hello Bernd,

All these elements are available in K2 by default.
Furthermore you can use extra fields, in order to display specific fields like the source or the actual link.

These videos will help you set up K2.
getk2.org/documentation/k2class2012

Hello Krikor,

first of all thank you for your friendly response. I assisted the recommended video-clips and already started with a test installation. As you already mentioned, many features are already available. During my first steps, some basic questions appeared:

1.) The description (teaser, summery of an article, etc.) of a single the news clip could be realised in two different places, either using the standard K2 contend text field, or an "extra" text field.
=> Which of both methods would you recommend?

2.) After implementing, I would like to see, within the menu item list, a hyper-link (e.g. "read original article"), leading to the source of the information. Thus I do not want to open first the "K2 article" and in a second step click on the link to the source of the information.
=> How could this be realised?

3.) I have seen that K2 works nicely with a lot of standard templates (such as Beez), however some features (comments, "read more") do not work properly on my existing template (Joomla! 3.5.1, T3 based template, using bootstrap). I just seeing a blue screen, titled "Edit Item".
=> Is there a generic issue with T3? Or do you have any hint, where the problem might come from?

Thank you for your attention, b/rgds

1) I would use the introtext which is a default field.
In K2's params you can have a separate editor for the introtext and the fulltext.

2) This can be done with an extrafield which stores the link of the original article.

3) The T3 framework supports K2, however I am not aware of the specifics of that template. You will have to ask the template's developer.