Re: Link Management

Hi,

Yes, as you've indicated, referencing pages by "ID" greatly helps
in link management.

Beyond this, I've seen a wide range of approaches:

* Silently hiding broken links on publish (good for site visitors, bad
   for authors and site admin)

* Generating reports of broken links on publish

* Preventing pages from being deleted *at all* if things link to them

* When deleting a page, popping up a dialog box that gets the author
   to rework all links that would be broken

* When human-friendly URLs are published, there needs to be some
   further management of the published site. The best approach I've seen
   is to track whenever a page is moved, and to *automatically* create
   a redirect on the published site to the new page location. Works very
   nicely!

In general, link management is better handled in products for "structured 
links"
(such as related pages), rather than "unstructured links" (links made within
the WYSIWYG editor).

Surprisingly, some of the very largest vendors don't provide any link
management at all!

Cheers,
James

>I don't indend to dominate the list; let me know if these questions are better
>asked elsewhere.
>
>I'm wondering how different CMS vendords and implementations manage links in
>both structured and unstructured content (such as that greated by WYSIWYG
>editors).  Specifically, what does the system do when users rename, move or
>delete records?  If links are represented by GUID instead of path, rename and
>move seem pretty straightforward, but that doesn't address delete or linking
>by path.  I see a number of options that could possibly be combined:
>
>-workflow process provides link report for manual review before publication,
>prevents publication resulting in broken links
>-on rename/delete/move, list affected pages for update
>-published site disables anchor tag for invalid URLs
>
>What am I not considering?
>What are people using?
>What is working?
>
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-------------------------
James Robertson
Step Two Designs Pty Ltd
Knowledge Management / Content Management / Intranets

http://www.steptwo.com.au/
[email protected]