#126: Link type improvements

Contents

1. Motivation
2. Assumptions
3. Proposal
4. Progress log

Proposed by

Alexander Limi

Proposal type

Architecture

State

being-discussed

Motivation

Currently, the Plone standard "link" content type is dumb as rocks. Favorites is another content type that is unnecessary with if we expand the coverage of a link a little bit.

Assumptions

• Opening a link in a new window should only be applied when used as Favorite, so that it affects your own habits - I believe that it is fundamentally evil to put this in the hands of the individual user for normal links.
• For the intranet use case it makes sense, though - so it should respect a site-wide setting to open all links in new windows (or tabs in more sane browsers). This requires a configuration toggle in the external link markup script (the code was there earlier, I believe it was deactivated).
• There should be a separate proposal to clean up the Favorites mess, this proposal is mainly about the Link type. If we don't replace favorites with this type, the rest of the PLIP is still a valid PLIP.

Proposal

The link type should be extended with the following abilities:

• Automatic redirection - when you can edit the object, it doesn't do this, though - like with File/Link objects in the current listings, it goes/acts directly on the object if you don't have the permissions to edit it, and goes to the view page if you have editing permissions
  • This should work in the navtree too
• Ability to open link in new window (see Assumptions)

Two things that we should consider:

• Use links as favorites - we don't need two types for this!
• Have a checkbox that says "index linked page" that uses wget/lynx to get a copy of the page you link to and indexes the words it contains in the local Link object. This way, if you search for something that is contained in a page that is linked to, you will get search result hits.

Progress log

Half of this is already in Plone 2.5 (link objects act as redirection in content listings + navtree), and if possible I'd like to see this be a "sleeper PLIP" for 3.0. If the rest isn't done, no big deal, it doesn't go into 3.0 - but if somebody has a day or so to fix this before the betas, I'd hate to see it be excluded just because there isn't a bundle as such. :)