How to Make Multithumb Work with K2

Many of the Joomla websites we work on have multithumb installed. Multithumb, in case you don’t know what it is, is a Joomla plugin that automatically converts images to thumbnails (or smaller images) so as not to break the layout of the page. In some cases, multithumb works perfectly, but in many cases, its settings need some tweakings for it to work…

For example, if you’re using K2 as your main content engine and you need to create thumbnails of the images in your K2 articles, then multithumb will not work in its default settings. However, it’s very easy to address that! Here’s what you need to do:

• If you want multithumb to work in the itemlist view of K2
  1. Go to Extensions > Plug-in Manager.

  2. Search for multithumb and then click on the multithumb plugin.

  3. On the right hand side, click on Integration Parameters.

  4. Change the value of Blog Page rules to:

     option=com_content&view=featured,option=com_content&layout=blog,option=com_k2&view=itemlist

• If you want multithumb to work in the article view of K2

  1. Do the steps 1 to 3 above.

  2. Change the value of Article Page rules to:

     option=com_content&view=article,option=com_flexicontent&view=items,option=com_k2&view=item

But, what about excluding specific categories?

Since the items in K2 and Joomla articles both have catid as the name of the field containing the id of the category that this item/article belongs to, then, thankfully, there is no need to modify the multithumb plugin to accommodate this functionality.

So, is that really it?

Well, in some cases, it is not. In fact, on many websites we worked on where most of the content came from K2, we had to modify the multithumb plugin (not just its parameters) to make it fully compatible with K2. So, if you implement the above steps and they don’t work for you, then most likely the multithumb plugin needs to be modified – contact us if you need help doing that! We are experts in Joomla, our fees are affordable, we work very fast, and we are the friendliest programmers on this planet, period!

Update October 2013: There is a bug with some versions of multithumb that results in multithumb ignoring the blog rule settings. To fix this bug, open the multithumb.php located under the plugins/content/multithumb directory, and change the first instance of IS_BLOG_RULE to is_blog_rule. If you don’t do that, multithumb will not work in K2 categories.