Submitted by David Hobbs on 19 December 2007 - 9:25pm
Especially as a content management system grows to have a large amount of content, it would be nice if you could do structured link checking. One of the problems with link checking in general is what to do with the reports once you get them. Of course, for a very small site you can easily scan an entire site with tools like LinkScan ($) and Xenu Linksleuth (free, but ads are put in the reports) or even monitor 404 requests and use single page tools like the LinkChecker Firefox extension. But with large sites you can end up with reports that are hard to know where to even start fixing links. This is especially true for CMS-driven sites: the same bad link may appear in only one piece of content that is displayed throughout the site. Or you could wind up linking from lots of content items to a url (possibly outside your control) that changes. I envision getting a report with a list of the bad links, where a user (with appropriate global rights) could indicate the correct new link which would get reflected in all content items (or left menus or other components surrounding the content) that used that link. This list could be prioritized by the cumulative page views that contained that bad link, or by the number of pages that contained that link. Another approach might be to provide a prioritized list of content items that have bad links (preferably directly linkable to edit mode of that content item. At any rate, note that we're not talking about pages here but content items or links -- the user can quickly take action that will correct links on multiple pages. A long list of pages (specific urls) with bad links are confusing, but, more importantly, aren't as quickly actionable. Here is how normal link checking reports look and how more useful reports might look:
| Before / Existing Reports (where do you start with a report like this, where content items may drive multiple pages?) |
Report indicating bad links where the user can immediately correct them (and apply the correction everywhere) |
Report indicating which content items have the bad links(content items linkable to edit them directly) |
- http://badlinkone.com is referenced on http://example-site.com/page1, http://example-site.com/page35, and http://example-site.com/page102
- http://badlinktwo.com is referenced on http://example-site.com/page1, http://example-site.com/page1023, http://example-site.com/page2439, http://example-site.com/page5192
Etc. |
Etc. |
Etc. |
One possible way to implement this is to change all the urls into some logical link in your CMS. Assuming your CMS stores straight HTML rather than a more structured format, then any url the user enters could be changed to a macro (if the user could put in a hard link directly into the HTML without the system changing it, even if there was an option for creating a logical link, most users would probably just skip the logic linking). For example if the user put in this HTML:
<![CDATA[<a href="http://hobbsontech.com>Hobbs On Tech</a>]]> then the system would replace it with
<![CDATA[!link(123," _fcksavedurl="http://hobbsontech.com>Hobbs On Tech</a>]]> then the system would replace it with
<![CDATA[!link(123,"Hobbs On Tech")]]>and put in its link repository that link 123 was
http://hobbsontech.com. When the page was generated then the correct link could be replaced in the HTML (so of course the end user's browser should never see the "123" in the HTML). If the page linked to was in your CMS, then the macro could be different and just indicate the unique key for the content item being pointed to (this would depend on whether the context that the content appeared in was relevant). For example:
<![CDATA[!cms_item(123,"Hobbs On Tech")]]> Related items that a link repository might help with:
- Reporting on content use. A link repository would allow other interesting reporting, such as the most linked-to content items in your repository.
- Easily move content. In some cases, it may be easier to move content if you had a link repository. For instance, you may sometimes need to restructure your site resulting in the links changing. With a link repository, you could automatically change all the links so that the move did not result in broken links (of course this would work best for intranet sites where there were limited links outside your control to your content).
Of course, this would add complexity (and possible failure points) to a CMS. Do you think it would be worth it?
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