Joomla K2 – Separation Between User & Developer/Designer

Knowing Our Roles

The whole purpose of using Joomla and K2, is to build websites that are easily editable by the user. However, this does not mean that the whole website is editable by the user. There are certain functions that should be left to the developer/designer.

The key is to know your role. The developer/designer’s role is to make your website well functioning, easy to use, and aesthetically pleasing. The user’s role is to use the website in order to display content that betters their business and/or meets their personal goals. Therefore, users should mainly use K2 in order to edit the content itself (text, images, extra fields), while leaving the structure, organization, and styling for the developer/designer.

What Is Editable By Users?

Categories

• Depending on how your website is formatted, you may or may not use categories in order to display content. If your website does use categories to display content, unless you really know what you are doing, changing the title, description, and image should be the extent to which you edit categories on your own (shown below in green). Other functions tend to change the overall layout of the webpage, whereas the functions listed above only change the content that is displayed.
• Creating new categories should also be left to the developer/designer, because this involves many styling features that are not easily editable from the front end.

Items

• Items are more easily editable by the user. This is because the main function of K2 Items is to display content, whereas K2 categories are often the mechanism that holds and organizes K2 Items.
• Titles, content, images, extra fields, tags, author publishing status, and metadata information can all be edited by the user (shown below in green). However, you may want to consult your developer/designer before creating new extra fields, because this often involves styling from the back-end.
• Users can also add new items. However, when doing so, remember to select an associated category (shown below in yellow).

Media Manager

Users can easily upload and organize images via the media manager. However, there are a couple important things to keep in mind before doing so.

• Do not delete, rename, or relocate files or folders that are currently being used on the website.
• Read our tutorial on how to prepare and upload images so that the images are formatted correctly.

Extra Fields & Extra Field Groups

• Users can edit extra field content within K2 Items. However, in most cases, you should consult your developer/designer before creating new extra fields or extra field groups, because they may need to be styled from the back-end.