Table of contents
An enhanced version of the base Plone link content type.
After installing this you'll see that the Plone link will have a new image and caption fields like the News Item content type.
Also the new Link type can handle internal (to Plone contents) and external links. You can use the internal link field to automatically attach the link value to an internal content of the portal (in a similar way used for related contents).
An event-based system will also keep URLs updated even when you move/rename target document.
You can also customize the link icon for being able to use a different icon from the default Plone ones. Due to changes between Plone 3 and Plone 4 themes, we need to keep the Plone 3 approach for displaying icons (not using CSS sprite. To restore the Plone 4 default way, disable the smart_link.css resource and remove the "Icon (Expression)" value from portal_types tool).
When using an internal link you can choose to use title and description from the referenced content instead of the ones you used in the Link content itself. In this way the Link is more like a proxy of the referenced item.
This feature is globally disabled by default (in the control panel), then can be enabled on every Link content activating the "Use referenced content's data" option.
The Smart Link structure is nothing more that a ATLink content, so the way used to store URL in the object or in the site's catalog is the same as Plone. There is no magic behind.
For this reason, when you are using Smart Link for internal references, the static URL is stored and used.
This will lead to problems when you are using this product for site where you have different back-end/front-end URLs; those problems are the same you have when you don't use this product!
For this reason you must use the "Configure Smart Link" control panel to handle URL transformation.
You can also use an option that says to Smart Link to store relative URLs, but this will also include the Plone site id in every link (and you must rewrite this from Apache if you don't like this).
Smart Link contains two Generic Setup import steps that can help you to transform all you ATLink to Smart Link, or to go back to ATLink if you don't like Smart Link anymore (automatically done when you uninstall the product).
Smart Link shape-change itself to be the Link content type, and hide the basic Plone Link type. Old ATLink already created will continue working normally, but only new created link will behave the Smart Link features.
Pay attention when you update the whole portal_catalog using ZMI from URLs different from back-end or front-end ones (for example: using a SSH tunnel).
If you run the update from (for example) "localhost:8090/site" and this URL is not the public or one of the back-end URLs, all your internal links will be changed to this hostname! Another catalog update (from the right URL) will fix this.
You can re-install Smart Link safely for upgrade task or for restore changes, without any problem.
If you uninstall it, all data from Smart Link will be removed. This means that if you re-install it after all your internal links will not be linked to target contents.
Smart Link has been tested on:
- Plone 4.1
- Plone 4.2
- Plone 4.3
Developed with the support of:
All of them supports the PloneGov initiative.
This product was developed by RedTurtle Technology team.
Thanks to:
- Mauro Amico (mamico) for providing support and fixing issues.
- Stefan Strasser for testing the product on Plone 4, and reports problems
Part of the code of Smart Link was taken from the ComboLink Plone (and Plonegov) product. This project was giving the same internal link feature in old 2.1/2.5 Plone releases.