I still don’t understand why majority of blogs don’t use K2 Theme Engine for Wordpress. k2 is not simply a theme but a complete platform on which wide variety of themes are based. Normal Wordpress Themes can also be ported to k2 system.
Understanding K2
Simple k2 theme looks just like default wordpress theme but with whole lot of features thrown in. It includes Ajax Commenting, Ajax Pages, Ajaxified search, Rolling Archives, Ajax Archives, Complete replacement of Widgets with k2 Sidebar Manager(much more advanced), Sidebar Asides, Gravatar in WP 2.5 and lot more features I don’t remember at the moment.
Get k2 here. (Current version is RC6 which is compatible with Wordpress 2.5.x)
In the coming weeks, I will review some cool mods, themes for k2. I am also thinking of porting famous wordpress templates to k2 platform too.
So, is K2 worth it or not? I’m a newcomer to WordPress (I wanted to take the Drupal route but I am not ready yet), and will experiment with K2. Any precaution to have?
I hear what your saying about K2 being an advanced system and all that. But it doesn’t look nice at all for a WordPress theme one bit.
I’d go as far as to say it looks horrible in fact. Si it doesn’t really matter what’s under the hood, if it doesn’t look pleasing to the eye.
Is K2 really the best? I’ve been working with it and ’standard’ Wordpress themes for a few years now, and I’m not convinced.
It may offer good functionality but this comes at the cost of easy maintenance and legible code.
K2 uses a whole host of extra custom PHP functions that are more complicated to re-use and less widely supported than those documented in the Wordpress codex. e.g. K2’s get_the_time() vs the standard the_time() – in this case there’s barely any difference in functionality, but K2 is a lot more cumbersome.
[...] I’m disappointed that this plugin uses yet another theme engine (Carrington as opposed to K2). [...]
Nice share thankyou.
I completely agree with you that K2 is a great theme platform but I can also figure out why it has not become number one and is not going to. K2 really offers enough features ant neat appearance but what people often search for is just something original from a designer’s point of view. Yes, not all of the bloggers are able to create unique design by theirselves and a ready-made graphics theme is their resort. K2 simply doesn’t offer enough ready graphic variants to satisfy everybody. It is more like unification, I would say.