However, since Joomla doesn't come with a built-in commenting system, your visitors wouldn't be able to leave comments on your new post. If you wanted to provide the ability for users to add comments, you'd need to install a commenting extension. There are many available on the Joomla Extensions Directory, some free, some commercial, of varying levels of quality and usefulness. You'd pick one, possibly pay for it, install it, configure it, and switch it on, hoping it didn't break your site's template, which it usually wouldn't... usually...
If you wanted to add social bookmarking features to your blog, that required another extension. If you wanted to add tagging to your blog - the ability to associate one or more descriptive, linkable tags to your posts, independent of whatever category you published it in - that required another extension; again, there are several available, some free, some commercial. If you wanted to have nested categories - the ability to add subcategories to your existing categories - that required yet another extension.
It was definitely doable, but fairly awkward and cumbersome, and certainly nothing like the incredibly sleek and easy out of box experience provided by dedicated blogging platforms like WordPress.
But now we have K2, which incorporates *all* of the features described above - plus many more - into a single free extension.
Repeat - free. As in beer. No charge to it.
K2 allows you to bypass Joomla's existing section > category > article hierarchy completely. Instead, it provides you with the ability to create unlimited nested categories. You can have categories within categories within categories within categories ad infinitum - or, more practically, until you hit three or four nested levels, as anything beyond that would start to severely impact your site's user-friendliness.
Into these categories you can place items, which are basically articles. You can also create an unlimited number of simple tags, and apply as many as you want to each item. When you're done writing your item, you save it, publish it, and if you've got K2 hooked up to your "blog" menu item on the front end, there it is, your post, with tags, a powerful and easy to use commenting system, social bookmarking, article rating, the works.
I have to bugger off now to get some work done, but in near future posts we'll continue to examine K2, focusing on customizing content display, fiddling with CSS, how to set up image galleries and embed video, what the "extra fields" tab is for, how to add attachments, and much more.
Plus we'll analyze the upcoming beta of Joomla 1.6 and compare it with K2 to find out how much there is in the way of feature overlap and if you should jump into K2 now on your Joomla 1.5 site, or eschew K2 altogether and wait for Joomla 1.6 to come out.
Note: I realize that JoomlaWorks also has a dedicated commercial blogging extension - Superblogger - which we'll look at in another post. As far as I can tell from a quick glance at it, almost all of its features are included in K2. Perhaps I'm wrong... we'll see.