K2 Category Settings Disappear After Save on a Joomla Migrated Website

We love K2 (we actually said that before) and we think that it’s a better content manager than Joomla’s own content manager. In fact, we are increasingly helping companies migrating the content of their Joomla websites from Joomla to K2.

However, there are always little issues with K2, which is perfectly acceptable considering its huge functionality and the relatively small team behind it. However, some of these issues are quite annoying. One critical problem with K2 is that although the category settings are preserved when migrating a Joomla website from 1.5 to 2.5, they are lost on first save. Let us explain more…

Let’s assume you have just migrated your K2 powered Joomla website from 1.5 to 2.5. The K2 extension content migration is extremely simple and all you need to do is to export the old K2 tables through phpMyAdmin and import them (also through phpMyAdmin) to your new website. Everything will work as it should (provided you set the access field in both the #__k2_categories and the #__k2_items tables to “1” after migration – if not you will definitely experience what’s described here), your items and categories will appear as they should since all the settings will be ported.

But, say you open a K2 category for editing, and then you save it, then all your previous settings for that category will be lost. This is because the K2 administrator in Joomla 2.5 assumes that the category settings are stored (in the database) in a way that is different from how they were stored in Joomla 1.5. This is a very serious problem if you have many categories and many articles with altered settings!

So, how can this problem be solved?

Well, there are four options to solve this problem:

1. You re-create the settings in Joomla 2.5, while taking advantage of the settings inheritance feature of K2 in case you have many categories with the same settings. This works well if you just have a few categories with user-set settings.

2. You modify the K2 template to ensure that the look & feel is consistent regardless of the category settings you have stored in the database. However, there are four drawbacks to this method:

   1. It is only good when the settings for all the categories is the same.

   2. It requires programming skills to be implemented.

   3. Changing any category’s settings from K2’s backend in Joomla will no longer work. This means that every time you need to make a change, you will need to do it in the template itself.

   4. If you change your K2 template, then your layout settings will not be ported, and you have to re-create them in the new template.

3. You can ask some Joomla consultants (such as us!) to migrate your settings to Joomla 2.5 so that you won’t have the problem at all. This option will cost you money but it’s definitely the ideal solution.

If you need help with implementing any of the options above, then please contact us. We are always here to help (24/7/365 or 366, if it’s a leap year!), we know exactly how to fix your problem, our fees are affordable, and we are very, very friendly!