I am attempting to figure out a way to have a menu item link directly to a page that is an open editor for a new article. Ideally this would also allow me to pre populate some of the category and possibly tag information for the article.

This would be for a person who is responsible for publishing specific articles, but we do not want to give admin access to the back end. We want to make it as simple as possible with a separate menu item for each type of article. This would pre-populate the article categories and tags if possible. Leaving them just the responsibility of filling in the text portion of the article and submitting it.

I can give them the ability to add new from the articles themselves, but this is not the way we want the system to function.

Is there an easy way to do this? Am I missing something? Thanks for any advice you can give.

You could try creating a menu item link to K2 -> Item Edit Form.

That was actually the first thing I tried, but so far I have had no luck.

So far it will not give me an edit page, just 404 errors. I have no idea why and have been unable to even diagnose the problem. Yes, Frontend Editing is enabled.

Also the only target window options are just New With Navigation and New without Navigation. I just want it to work in a normal Parent window like it is supposed to.

The third issue is that I would really like to be able to specificly poplulate a few tags and there seems to be no way of doing this.

Overall I am frustrated. I just want this to work without wasting days of effort.

for the edit page first try to see if this link works:

/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&task=add&tmpl=component

go to that page, if it shows the front end item edit form, then your setup for it, then we can do a bypass of sorts, to make it appear in your menu, if not, does the user or you have proper user, and group permissions setup within k2?

you can read this thread for someone with a similar issue: getk2.org/community/New-to-K2-Ask-here-first/172530-costumize-item-edit-form#174029

the tags part, it might be possible, but would probably require a good bit of code changes