I love K2 and Zoo, but both have shortcomings. I checked out FlexiContent the other day, and it looked promising. JSebold is a great idea (uses com_content), but I felt like the interface was a bit clunky.

If Sobi2 is a CCK, I guess that would make Mosets Tree a CCK as well, right? Although, with Tree, you can't define different content types, so maybe it's not.

Also, I think JXtended's Catalog is a CCK as well. Last time I used it, it wasn't quite as user-friendly as Zoo or K2, but it's a great tool for developers.

I think Mosets Tree and probably also MosDirectory are also CCK.
BTW: we are also working on new component, Sobi Pro which should even be more suitable for other tasks beside creating "business directory"

Excellent post, Steve. Fabrik is another addition for the list.

It's pretty obvious the Joomla! community approaches problem solving differently than the community that came up with CCK. We end up with many separate efforts underway, and everyone kind of dukes it out in the marketplace. (I get that there are subtle differences, but essentially the same types of capabilities, yes?)

So, is competition and marketing or collaboration and education the best way to build excellent solutions for a free software community?

Certainly, collaboration has the promise of strengthening a specific extension and building an architecture where things fit together. Especially helpful with strategic pieces, like content builders.

Competition can bring many more solutions which a free market sorts through.

If there are benefits to the broader community for collaborating, what's in it for developers? How can we encourage collaboration and help them put food on the table?

Sobi2 is a CCK. We created a custom real estate management site out of it. It's a great tool.

The interface needs some help. It has Paypal integration which is nice too.

Developed, tried and using Form2Content LITE and PRO (a Joomla CCK)http://www.opensourcedesign.nl...joomla-cck. We are relatively new in the Joomla extension world but our component is stable and offers lots of (creative) possibilities but above all uses com_content so it is third party compatible.

Form2Content uses custom input forms (with a choice of 15 field types) and combines it with dynamic templates to generate the article content. Full DEMO, tutorials and documentation available.

We also have a Search Component extension and a XML Export extension for Form2Content!http://www.opensourcedesign.nl

Resources @ http://www.mightyextensions.co...tent-types
useful for all kinds of content types (specially if you are handy enough to tweak the 2 templates provided you can get as far as you want with it, and the set of content-types provided for free bits k2 by far). therefore it should be there at the top of current list of joomla ccks. has been around for a while and is extremely powerful and well documented with both videos and written documents as well as a very supportive team and lively forum with over 2000 entries

k2 is very promising and comes from a company who seems to have a good deal of awareness in developing catchy looking extensions as k2 as well is right out of the box. k2 is going might get to a point where it becomes The cck of joomla but would need to invest some time in their forums answering the sooo many unanswered questions and they really need to work some on the documentation (hmmm, but i am maybe not the right person to complain doing so little for the community and yet benefiting some). i think one of the issues they are facing is that its so easy to get it setup initially that many joomla novices install the system and the forum attracts quite a deal of such questions that remains unanswered

well fabrikar sure, definitely fits the bill, have been around for a while, extremely flexible but i have considered it more as a powerful form construction kit rather as a cck and besides fabrikar faces various performance issues which needs to be addressed first. other than that their support team is very responsive and the forum has a wealth of information on every kinda use case and issue you might face and as i understand it they are about to release version 2 after such long time of development

simply exciting joomla times but i am very doubtful to this scattered landscape and as these components are very important in many non basic projects i am afraid non well performing or not to the joomla! well aligned projects might drag the joomla! name down the drain. i would appreciate the drupal approach, but of course 1.6 first

Great article
Its a wonderful tool in our company, but I have to agree that the interface does need help.

While still using the Joomla section/categories, JReviews introduces a directory concept as well and can be used with regular Joomla articles. It has been around since July 2006 with pretty much the same basic features as now. Even though it's built around a powerful review system, it has plenty CCK functionality like listing types, many custom fields to choose from with some interesting features like access settings per field, advanced search with customizable search forms, 100% customizable theme files and so on. It even has RCK (review construction kit) so you can design your own user review forms leveraging the same custom field functionality.

I know its not GPL, but Jreviews is CCK and I think it's been around before k2 and Zoo. First it is a review system, but you can also create articles and make custom fields. Best of Joomla.com looks like it is Jreviews, and if it isn't it's possible to do what they did with Jreviews (except the extension list which is mosets).

A while ago, I went through the Joomla CCK's evaluating them. I ended up choosing JoomSuite Resources from Mighty Extensions

It seemed the most obvious to me for what the purpose I wanted to do.

Also really Jxtended magazine does this especially the newest versions. In the old old days there was myhomepage that actually was great for defining a custom page layout once you understood it (but only one per site I think), but if iirc it fell victim to the register globals issue.

I think it's great to have so many smart people working to solve the same issues and sharing their work. Just like science really.

Okay CCKrazy is a nice title...

...but in the Joomla World there a so many Extensions that do the same:

We have so many weather moduls,

so many forum components,

so many comments components...

so many acl components...

and so on and on and on.

Hot Air for nothing!

But all the Extensions do one thing:
They extend joomla! And that is beautiful,or?

Many other CMS in the world have all the things above from scratch and you must not do extra install this.

Yep, there's quite a bazaar of choices all of a sudden! Well, it's better to have too many than none I suppose... but this is not without drawbacks. Consider the time it takes to test out each one to find the right one. Then there's the plight of the poor companies that find themselves overwhelmed with competition.

You can say that choice and competition leads to a better product... but at least in this case, CCK is the type of feature that really belongs in the core of your CMS. If anyone doubts that, try a few of these for yourselves. Each one has major drawbacks and has it's own solution (or none at all) for dealing with lack of communication with the core.

I've tried about half of these and IMO, Jseblod and Fabrik come out on top (Flexicontent and Bcontent sound great, but they're still in beta). For me, these are the only choices as all of the others to my knowledge ignore Joomla's normal article and category system. (I don't get it, why not just use Drupal or another CMS if you're going to use these?)

Steve, I think you've got your Jseblod info a bit wrong. ATM it's free as in beer (it has a subscription for newer updates). Also, it does use Joomla's article system and has the best UI I've ever seen for posting articles (you can customize it any way you like). Problem with it is that it puts a bunch of template code in Joomla article field. What that means is while you can use Joomla's normal article database, only modules that process Joomla plugins can process the template code and will turn out as expected.

Fabrik is great for many things, but not strictly intended as a CCK. So expect to do some extra work for templating and such.

unleash.it

i totally agree on the part where cck should simply be part of joomla! core or at least the joomla! core should provide enough power to extend the com_content, with a plugin kinda structure. it would be such a dream to simply install a certain number of types to your joomla content category and vips you would have it in your editor, as well as be able to extend the core search capability with and temaplating

and i also agree on the fact that it seem to take a lot of time of a developer trying to figure out the most optimal choice, and one also needs to keep the whole thing abreast as they come with new releases, but to be frank i find the current status as much better than what it was only a 1.5 year back

have you used resources and k2?

what are the lacks of "lack of communication with the core" you are referring to. are you referring to the content component?

I have built a number of sites this year with Fabrik and find it to be extremely flexible with great subscriber support. I have not found anything I wanted to build that could not be done.

Being a light-weight developer, I prefer to go with template clubs (currently signed up with Rockettheme and Yootheme). Both have integrated CCK into their templates and Yootheme introduced Zoo awhile back -- although it needs more work and integration with their Warp5 framework.

My biggest concern with all these CCKs is integration with Joomla's 1.6 core. Will there be an easy migration path to the new Joomla release or will we be stuck with 1.5? I would rather wait and see who emerges with the best product built on the J 1.6 core -- hopefully by next summer. I really like the look and feel of K2 and Zoo from a design standpoint.

Gobezu, for several reasons. One, good plumbing. With K2, Zoo, Resources, etc. that have their own content db fields and url router, you can no longer use a whole lot of useful extensions. This includes everything from lots of useful modules that use com_content's data to plugins for seo, sitemaps and url's. The later may have some support depending on the CCK, but just for example, Xmap will now have to maintain an extension for each non-standard CCK plus the Joomla core. I don't think it's going to happen.

Reason #2, usability. If you're using Joomla as a content management system for others who have limited web knowledge, you're going to have to explain to them why half of Joomla's back end is dead in the water... and why they need to manage everything through a link in the components menu.

Also as Ken brings up, some of the problems like nested categories are set to be fixed in 1.6. IMO The best CCK to go with now is one that follows the core, because it will have a much easier time adapting. Are K2 and Zoo going to go though the all the trouble, or just keep being a CMS in a CMS?

@Steve, Great article and what a nice baby, you sure must be proud!

As for the CCK components, I recently tried K2 and the new 2.x version is a lot better then version 1.x.
As for integration into Joomla Core... I think most Joomla! webmasters don't need it yet or it should be as easy to use and change as a Template. Joomla 1.6 will have great new features, I just hope it still stays as user friendly as it is today.

I'm one of the devs of fabrik, and whilst this is not a complete comparison list and I'm sure I've missed out what some of the other components do I drew up this (partial) comparison chart the other day :

http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=tGVHNxceq-_qmlCrV_SykCQ&output=html

red is that the feature is not available for the given component, green is that it is and blank is that its not filled in by me yet.

Obviously this has a bias towards Fabrik's features as that is what I was comparing against.

What packages get included really depends on your definition of a CCK. If you're only talking about adding content types, it narrows the list. Rob's list includes things that are considered application development, which encompasses a larger range of features. Fabrik is a great example of a Joomla application development platform, not just a CCK. It depends on what you need.

Hi Rob, Great list. I'll send you a feature update for Form2Content if you send me your email-address (ie post me a mail).
Hopefully you can include "Joomla native" (RSS, Print, Mail etc.) and "Uses Plugins" in the overview since F2C doesn't want to re-invent the wheel and uses the normal 3rd party plugins for most of the features (like Google Maps, Slideshows, tabs & slides, Videos etc.). This makes the use simple, very creative for the users and keeps it stable and secure.

@Patrick - I'd love to update the doc with your additions - probably easiest if you post it via the fabrik site's contact form http://fabrikar.com/contact-us

@Steve - yeah the list was a bit of a killer to compile even to its current uncomplete state. I did it to see what other 'competitors' to fabrik were doing and to try to get an overview of how Fabrik stands in the 3pd component ecosystem. So obviously its more biased towards 'forms' than simply cck - but then an integral part of cck is having forms that will allow the submission of content so I think the distinction is blurred

Probably you've all been missing
pages and items as a component for custom itemtypes:
http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/news-production/content-construction/5583
maybe a bit rough, but still functional...

@rob great chart, but is still missing flexicontent and pages and items

Had not heard of FlexiContent, thank you.

Very interesting article. Thank you. I created my first Joomla! site the day before yesterday, a blog. Working with the way Joomla! organizes content has been challenging. This article and the great comments are giving me a lot of insight that I can use on my current and future Joomla! projects. Thanks again.

fyi Amy asked me to publish the comparison chart for anyone to edit - so here's the small annoucement about that
http://www.alltogetherasawhole...-document

woops the link didn't come out too well there - here it is again:

http://www.alltogetherasawhole...n-document

Welcome. That's a great stuff!!

Just wanted to clarify that K2 is a full com_content replacement WITH CCK capabilities. It is not JUST a CCK component.

I'd note the following things as part of the K2 dev team:
- K2 is a professional solution aimed from newbies to professionals making money developing sites with Joomla. We don't kid here when we emphasize the "professionalism".
- K2 is backed by a solid company, JoomlaWorks, who has been around for 3 years and will be around for more.
- K2 is a full com_content replacement and that being said it will play nice with 95% of all extensions developed for Joomla. Why so? Because only the rest 5% actually make use of com_content articles and I'm talking about little modules fetching content here and there. So the assumption that K2 does not play nice with "most" extensions is an utter lie or plain ignorance for the extensions market.

That being said, I believe in competition and I hope that various "CCK" solutions will help make Joomla!'s content far richer than it is by default. If this is "bad" for some, then you're missing the point that Joomla is a great platform to develop on and make websites, yet it's not so great when it comes to media publishing

Fotis

A fourth point:
From a performance standpoint, it is better when you have an integrated solution instead of 12 extensions "trying" to replicate the functionality of just one extension.

K2 has been tested on websites with 120.000+ articles (you'll see 2 published very soon live). Joomla's com_content + the 12 extensions or more would have the server neal down and beg for a reboot by the admin.

Can anyone beat that?

K2 is w/o no doubt a good extension with certain quirks but quite a young one, so we look so much forward to its development

Fotis, I don't doubt on the performance you mentioned here earlier about K2, and have read about it somewhere earlier. If possible, please indicate to the site with such excellent achievement for future references.

Thanks

Within November, these 2 sites will be publicly available, so anyone can see how fast and responsive they are in querying content and search results

Just imported 2076 articles.Now the fun of k2 configuration.No idea how I manage with out this before,new look be upo in 5 minutes

Fotis, because I agree and value the fact that you are an established company (and would agree that K2 is one of the more "professional" extensions available), I wasn't going to say anything. But using terms like "utter lie" and ignorance is definitely a stretch of the truth.

I'm someone who regularly designs and builds websites, many of them Joomla. I work on countless other Joomla sites and have over 13 years of web experience. I know without a doubt, that there are many good reasons to want to follow the core. Many of them have already been mentioned.

As for these modules that you say are insignificant aren't at all insignificant. They are part of what saves me countless hours when I do my work. Then there are other types of extensions besides content modules with problems. A few like sh404sef (at least I think) have taken it on themselves to work with K2. That's great, but now these types of extensions have to support two (or more) content components, or pick a side. Lastly, I like my articles to be in Joomla's system. If you ever go out of business, it's going to be a big PIA.

I think what you're doing can be fantastic, if you decide to integrate more with Joomla. Love it if you took Andrew up on his offer (I noticed on Brian's blog) to talk about integration.

These are just my opinions. Everyone can have whatever opinion you like. But there's need to go around calling people a liar or naive just because they aren't your customer.

As an end user i need a CCK using core content or i wouldn't use it.

@unleash.it

1. sh404SEF has made no effort to support K2. We wrote a "driver" for sh404SEF and K2 natively supports. The developer of sh404SEF has not extra work to do. Furthermore, since K2 is open, others have written drivers for virtually any other SEF component in Joomla!.

2. The modules that I refer to retrieve content from Joomla! articles and they all do the same thing under a difference style or layout approach. But basically all they can retrieve is the title, text, category, section and a few more. Compare that to K2's built-in mod_k2_content module

3. K2 does not have to be integrated with com_content. It's fully integrated though with the Joomla! framework. Which is what you need.

In end, you basically need to stop thinking of Joomla! articles as something tied into Joomla!. This is not true. And that is the reason we provide K2, the professional media publishing component for Joomla!.

Finally, I did not call you personally a liar. I should have restrained my comment to the fact that whoever claims this is a bit ignorant of the state of com_content modules in the Joomla! community.

P.S. Have a look at K2. If you build websites professionally, you will definetely appreciate the pro features it has compared to com_content plus the dozen more features.

I use JReviews on my site http://heartskitchen.com. I am very pleased with how it has performed. You can see examples of it on my Recipes pages. I especially like the strong Search Modules you can create using it.

Also I am testing out Flexi Content and my understanding is that it does use Joomla articles. It adds to it, but it is not outside of Joomla like ZOO or Mighty Resources.

By the way, I have used ZOO and Mighty Resources extensively. ZOO is nice design wise but limited in areas such as allowing people to add items to a directory. (cannot do it at all). Mighty Resources is pretty robust especially when you consider many of the other components that Mighty Resources has that can tie into it. I give 5 stars to it for flexibility and power,
3 stars for look and feel.

Thumbs way up for K2 also. Have not used it as much, but I like the way it looks in templates. Very clean in my opinion. Nice tool.

Well surprise, surprise, I've tried K2 (version 1 and 2). I've also tried many of the alternatives (and put in more time tinkering with them than I care to admit). I don't disagree that K2 is pretty cool. I'm not surprised that a lot of people are attracted to it, because out of the box it does so much... and certainly looks better (out of the box) then the alternatives.

As a designer, the latter doesn't mean much to me as I'm rarely satisfied with out of the box Well, sometimes if it needs to be quick and dirty, then yes of course it's a boon.

What I don't like about K2 as it is now and why I've decided not to use it in my projects, is that it's a proprietary system in enough ways that make a difference (to me). In my view, it's kind of a shame that you'd want to put so much energy into a separate content component.

Why do things like this keep happening with Joomla? I don't know how many of you devs actually build sites on a regular basis, but people like myself who do... are tired of trying to piece together a bunch of proprietary extensions. I'd like to be able to choose the commenting, tagging, CCK, SEF, site map, etc. solutions of my choosing and have it all play together nicely. I ALSO WANT TO PROVIDE MY CUSTOMERS A UNIFIED UI TO WORK WITH, WITHOUT A BUNCH OF DEAD JUNK. Honestly if you think about it, the Joomla way of allowing extensions to segment everything up is not a whole lot different than what Internet Explorer did with CSS. Maybe not quite as evil though

I agree of course that the core has been lacking. But right now, at this time when 1.6 is about to get a lot more stuff right, why not take advantage of it?

What Fotis is doing by giving his extension out the the community (hey we all need to make a living, so we'll see what his plans are eventually , is an awesome thing of course. But it would be nice if you guys thought a little more about the plight of us who build websites and try to work together more as a whole

p.s. I miss the old avatar with you on the throne...

we really need to take into consideration the very limited time the various cck ext. have been around for joomla

about 1 year (mighty resources eldest)

so we should give them some break

imagine where we were 1 year back and imagine where we will be 1 year ahead

i am sure the already stiff competition among the various providers itself will lead to the development of the ultimate cck tool

(although i agree with unleash.it in principle there doesn't seem to be any practical way to materialize the ideas in the near future other than ....)

Agreed for the most part Gobezu. I'm not placing blame. I'm just saying that it would be nice if Joomla developers sometimes tried to work together more. I don't wish to give Fotis or anyone a hard time. I just felt the need to explain that there are other opinions than his that may be valid... and that we're not all ignorant or the other word he used. Many people like K2, and and I'm not surprised as it's a great extension.

Sorry for overdoing the smiley winks...

@unleash.it
You obviously haven't seen what JoomlaWorks (via its sister company Komrade) have built with Joomla: http://www.komrade.gr (aside gazzetta.gr which is the most high traffic joomla website worldwide, after joomla.org, and TNA)

We are pro web developers and we build tools for our work primarily. We make extra money off our commercial extensions. But we don't plan to make money of K2. So suggesting that we have some secret plan for K2 is a lie.

We built a tool and we shared it with the community. Does this sound like something proprietary software developers would do? Can you name some other Joomla extension developer that actually builds websites like we do?

Don't take my word if you don't want to. Steve has seen the stats with his own eyes though. More here: http://www.alledia.com/blog/op...mla-sites/

FYI, Gazzetta.gr and TNA are Komrade/JoomlaWorks projects.

Fotis, I have no desire to get in a fight with you, and have never put down your work. If you read what I said, I make many compliments about it. I myself am a pretty simple guy. I take pride in my work, am confident that I know what I'm doing, but I'm content in keeping a lower profile and don't even make an effort to be a big player. So there's no need to flex muscles.

The thing I don't understand is why you seem to not be able to accept my (and other's) view points. This goes beyond CCK (and certainly Joomlaworks) here... I was raising a bigger issue of compatibility and integration. Not so much to complain about the past, but in hopes for the future. It seems like you have a hard time seeing things from other perspectives.

Secret plans? Never suggested that. I don't even know what you've told people about future charges or no charges and I haven't paid much if any attention. Personally, I'm not anti-commercial and it's good on you, but I don't think it's a bad idea for you to make money from your work And I have no reason not take your word for what you say you're going to do. So unlike yourself, I never called you a liar. And sorry if the throne comment might have offended you. It was trying to be just playful humor.

Let's cut it out. Maybe it would make you happy, but this type of thing makes me not want to get involved in Joomla discussions. I never came in here to put down you or K2, I was only interested in discussing what's the best CCK.

Rob's chart is nice but I need to make a decision and can't wait for 1.6 to be debugged and up (assuming it even does what these CCKs are doing).

While I am a fan of unleash.it for boldness, and not a fan of Fotis for flying off the handle, I need a solution and it appears that a CMS within a CMS is what I need because Joomla, for all its greatness, can't seem to get it done (which is why this market exists).

Learning Joomla has been hard enough, and learning every extension to boot is even worse. If a CCK can eliminate some other extensions, and add functionality I can't get from Joomla 1.5, why not?

Can anyone tell me which template maker/CCK combination would make the best one-two punch to replicate the restaurant and visitor guides in NYMAG.COM?

SOBI2, M. Tree, others don't have the ability to make it possible for a simpleton like me to achieve that degree of sophistication. Do any of these?

We are pro web developers and we build tools for our work primarily. We make extra money off our commercial extensions. But we don't plan to make money of K2

Let's all respect each other! The little wheels make the big wheels roll too. Hey I like being a little wheel. Allows me to get up and rolling where I want to go pretty quick...

Olindacat, I think most of them can get you there. K2 in many ways may be the easiest, because it's an all in one. The main thing it offers over the other solutions I think is unlimited nested categories. But more can be done w/Joomla's built in system then it's given credit for, if you creatively set it up.

I'm not hard core in my opposition to K2 or anything. I build multiple sites and I'm not thinking about just one particular site's needs. No doubt, K2 is a great app and yeah for sure, lots of cool sites being made with it.

Do you need reviews? Take a look at http://www.playshakespeare.com...at-hamlet. The jreviews component looks pretty cool for that type of thing. Lots of tagging extensions you could add on...

all this k2 talk let us not forget about the other great cck extension for joomla, mighty extension's resources

as for k2, please work some on the documentation of the field api as we really need more fields

thank you all developers

When I think of a good CCK I think of anything that can turn user forms into great designs.

jReviews is undeniably my favorite. I try not to but end up using it for pretty much every project. It is commercial but not really encrypted from a customization or templating standpoint, and is well worth the cost. The support is next to none, and it is continuously in development. I hear there will be a pretty cool google maps suite coming out for it soon... Plus, it uses j core content to render article pages so you can use any content plugin, of which there are thousands. Finally, add to it the easy template overriding, category-specific templates, super clean mvc code, tons of modules and content views, and you have a content machine to build any type of system you want.

K2 is cool and fills some limitations of jReviews (nested categories as the one that jumps out), but I stopped using it once I tried to get active in the Ning-based forum that doesn't allow you to post code. What a joke! Using Ning as a community for a joomla component? Not only is it a poor PR move, it just stifles collaboration when you can't post code!

Mighty Resources is nice and also allows nested categories and multi-categorization, and it's filtering feature is pretty sweet. However, modules are hard to configure but overall templating is pretty easy.

If you want an article geared more towards end users than developers, check out this post I just made on my own blog:

http://jomdoc.com/joomla-desig...ation-kits

dear jesse

(your sites looks nice)

now that's one interesting idea there. you made your cck choice or deselected one on the basis of a forum solution they opted to use

i would say you are missing out some major advantages in your tool sets as website developer

but hey, we all seem to run as far as we can with whatever tool we have mastered for the moment so good luck

Thanks, Jesse that to me is the most useful post so far. I'm interested in unbiased opinions from those who do site design on a regular basis. Finding the right CCK is not an easy decision to make... and regardless of certain large sites that are running certain extensions, the jury is still very much out on the subject.

Like you, among other things I see CCK as a great way to offer better templating to clients. Jreviews sounds great, and it probably deserves a name change... Too bad though it's not GPL and a bit pricey too. Have you tried Fabrik? I haven't done a CCK site with it yet, but it has a ton of great field plugins that go beyond most (if not all) of the others. Templating can use some documentation though and it's a swiss army knife so it's probably not best for quick and dirty stuff...

FYI the map implementation on the beer site is neat, but the pages won't come up for me! (when you click on the map balloons).

@gobezu -

Thanks for the compliments on my new blog, gotta hand the design cred to yootheme!

I think it is vital to any open-source project to have community support. I give freely to any forum I can and write tutorials when I figure out cool ways of doing things. I actually posted a few to the k2 forums, but having to attach txt files for code and reference them in the body of my post frustrated me so much that i stopped using k2. It wasn't really even a choice based on k2 itself. I don't see what the purpose what for joomlaworks to take k2 out of its main forum and move it over to ning... regardless, any good joomla admin could have set up a standalone joomla site with jomsocial and kunena in a day if they wanted something separate from the main site.

This is not at all to knock joomlaworks. I use frontpage slideshow on pretty much every site I have built recently, sigpro rocks, disqus comments are sweet, and superblogger is the all-around best blogging plugin when you only have admins posting articles.

@ fotis -

maybe you can weigh in on your choice for ning? I asked you on that site but never got a reply!

@ unleash -

Thanks for the compliment. I have tried to get the dev to release a non-review version but he is focused on getting it ready for 1.6 and working on that new geo addon. About the price, it is more than worth it. Clients don't mind paying for it because if it saves them two hours of my work down the line by letting them easily post content, it has already paid for itself. I'll be sure to check out fabrik in more detail and troubleshoot the beer site.

Related and relevant to this discussion, ...I'm curious to know how the launch of 1.6, with nested categories, will affect the popularity (and relevance) of these CCKs?

These are my favourite feature-definitions for a real CCK. Or call them decision-makers for up-coming projects:

- creation of different Content Types (does it utilize or replace com_content?)
- submission in frontend
- advanced search and filtering for custom fields
- templating

All the competitors have very important differences in those areas. Some features are missing completely! Are they really comparable...

Just wanted to say great job with the blog, today is my first visit here and I’ve enjoyed reading your posts.

Excellent points from unleash.it. I agree completely. Core components like com_content and com_banners are quite weak, but the fact that they play well together might be crucial to a particular project, and it is a lot more elegant, efficient, and far less time-intensive to use them than to load Joomla with more feature-rich workarounds. Yet take note of Andrew Eddie's Content Manager extension at the Art of Joomla--in its earlier versions at JXtended, it was entirely segregated from com_content, and I believe that is still true, so let's not suggest it is inherently wrongheaded to build a com_content replacement that has no integration with com_cointent.

Amy's questions about the different payoffs from competition versus collaboration are more to the point, but maybe we can continue to have both but in a more balanced way. Should the core have a locked-in content component at all? What do you call Joomla with 5 static pages in com_content, a custom application built in Fabrik, and JomSocial? Not a "CMS..."

If you want to define "CCK," first answer what is Joomla? What is a CMS? What is content? Most Joomla users seem to have the wrong idea about all three.

Joomla really has two different major kinds of "CCK" extensions. The first is focused on CMS functions, imagining "content" as "articles" and "pages." The second focuses more on letting you build an application and interface to do whatever you want. More specifically, we have:

1) Alternatives to com_content that retain com_content's focus on creating articles/pages but with more versatile article templating or custom article fields. Like com_content, frontend submission, especially from anonymous users, is limited.

2) Directory and advanced form builder extensions that provide more direct control over over the database with a focus on custom input and output screens as well as custom backend reports and controls.

I'm testing K2 and it's an awesome extension. I've been running an article website for the past 5 years using Mosets Tree and Community Builder. Mosets Tree doesn't use com_content. Mosets Tree is a full com_content replacement with CCK capabilities and nobody ever got mad at Lee because of that, I don't understand why some people are so unhappy with K2. My website powered by Mosets Tree has been been working fast and flawlesly during all this time with almost 10.000 articles and 1.400 registered authors publishing articles every day via front-end. That would NOT be possible with the limited com_content. If someone wants to criticize K2 for not using com_content, you will have to criticize Mosets Tree too. If you look at K2 as a component instead of the so talked "CCK", it is simply an awesome extension that addresses the com_content limitations since the mambo days. I personally doubt Joomla 1.6 will simplify the system for thousands of authors adding content via front-end. Being that the case, K2 has still a long road of usefulness ahead. Look at K2 as a powerful component instead of a com_content replacement and you will be really happy with it. I understant Fotis when he talks about JoomlaWorks reputation, it means that whatever changes Joomla 1.6 might bring, they are able to adapt to it, because they know how to do things and that's a strong point in K2. I personally don't like one-man-band projects that disappear the next day and leave you hanging. Fotis, if you read this, please add automatic pagebreak based on max. characters. Please provide a way for users to add articles immediatelly after they signup as registered users without an administrator having to add that user manually to the group. Thanks!