Hi, I'm trying to help someone out with a site that uses K2 for their blog. They have no link to the blog in their navigation, only a k2 content module on the home page showing the three most recent posts. The template they are using adds some design options to each menu item. However, there is no way to set these options for pages that don't come from a menu item, like the links from the k2 content module, so the design looks unfinished on the blog pages.

I've tried creating a hidden menu item for the blog (latest items from k2 category) with the correct design settings, but the links from the content module still display differently. Is there a way to set the k2 content module to load links with a specific itemid so that we can control the design on those pages?

Thanks!

Thanks for the feedback. This half-works. I normally use sh404sef, but this site doesn't have it, so I haven't faced this before.

I have a hidden menu item, which, when used, loads the pages using the correct /our-blog/ slug. When the items are clicked on from this category listing, the individual items load correctly using that slug followed by the item title alias. In these instances, all blog pages load with the correct modules and template settings.

The problem is that there are two K2 Content modules on the site. One is on all pages and one is just on the home page. Both of these modules link to the blog items using URLs like this:
/component/k2/item-title-alias
which loads the item pages without the correct module/layout assignments.

Interestingly, the one k2 content module that displays on all pages uses the correct "/our-blog/" slug in the URLs when its loaded on blog pages, but uses the "/component/k2/" slug when it loads on other pages, like the home page.

Oh, I've also enabled the "extra link" at the bottom of the k2 content module that appears on every page, and set it to use the blog menu item. This always displays that menu item's url correctly as "/our-blog/" even when the list of items above it are using the component slug.

Version 2.8.0 of K2 Content by Joomlaworks.

I didn't set-up this site, so anything's possible in terms of things being screwed up and not working normally.

No, this site DOES NOT use sh404sef. I've pitched that to the client as one means of fixing this issue, but right now it is just Joomla SEF.

However, it is using overrides for the K2 Content module. I'll see if I can take a look at those. It's complicated by my not having FTP access, but there is a Joomla extension that gives me file access.

I'm looking at the overrides. They are quite different, but they still still load the item URLs with the "echo $item->link;" slug, just like the default template for this module, so wouldn't the URL be the same regardless of which template was used?

It does look like these overrides were made using K2 v2.6.0 while the site is using k2 v2.8.0. Could that be a problem?

I copied the site into a test environment and removed all the overrides, and then set the modules to use the default templates. The k2 content modules continued to serve up URLs in the non-SEF format. Then I updated K.2 to 2.9.0, and they still served the URLs in the non-SEF format.

I installed sh404SEF and the K2 plugin, and everything seems to work fine now, even with the overrides restored. There may have been some other system customization in play, but my firewall software didn't detect any changed Joomla core files.