CB Plugins and K2 Integration

I use CB as our main user management and interaction function and K2 as our main article management. Currently the CB/K2 integration works very well, especially having the User generated K2 articles nicely listed and available in the CB article tab.

For the purposes of context our users can generate K2 articles on the site for Projects, Products and Organisations and blog categories. We use the K2 front end feature to allow the User to generate articles in these categories and CB to allow them to generate blogs in the blog K2 category.
This looks great with all K2 articles generated by the user listed under their CB Article tab and their Blogs under their CB Blog tab.

So far so good.

However, our site makes extensive use of the tags feature of K2 articles to create front end relationships between these K2 articles. Currently, ye CB Blog plugin only allows the user to generate blogs directly from the CB blog tab but is then only given the following fields for the Blog K2 article;

• Subcategory
• Access
• Title
• Introtext
• Fulltext

However, there is no tag field integration with K2.

There is one work around solution, which is to uninstall the CB Blog plugin and force users to use the K2 front end to generate blogs as they currently do for their other article categories. The downside is that these would not be separately listed in a blog tab on their profiles. This would not be the nicest solution but doable.

Hence, the following question before implementing:

Can the “create blog” button displayed on the CB blog tab (CB plugin) be hidden so that any K2 Articles of the “blog” category are just listed for access?

Or

Is there a way to integrate the K2 tags field into the CB Blogs “create Blog” page?

PS: The K2 article infrastructure is essential for complex site where K2 articles have complex content and we will in all likely hood have to remain with this as our core so it is very important for us to keep CB and K2 well integrated and so far I cannot see anything in Joomla 4 that would allow us to move from K2 to core articles. So we are encouraging the CB team continue closer integration with K2 going forward.

Can the “create blog” button displayed on the CB blog tab (CB plugin) be hidden so that any K2 Articles of the “blog” category are just listed for access?

Yes, within CB Blogs > Parameters > Blogs set "Create Access" to something they can't access. This will suppress the display of the create blog button since they won't have permission to create blogs. They will still be able to edit them though and that will use the CB Blogs edit page. CB Blogs has limited triggers so you won't be able to redirect away with CB Auto Actions so best approach is probably a 3rd party extension to just hijack the URLs and redirect them to K2 or create a custom mod_rewrite rule in htaccess to rewrite the URL to K2.

Is there a way to integrate the K2 tags field into the CB Blogs “create Blog” page?

Not at this time. We may implement tags support in a future release, but CB Blogs is meant to be a simple solution. Tags will probably be officially implemented in the Internal model once the plugin is rewritten with category views and more, which once that's done it will of course support tags in the other models.

Thanks