Smart Link

Handle back-end/front-end URLs

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).

Blob and Blob migration tool

SmartLink supports (starting from 1.0.0 revision) the use of blob for the image field. In this way we doesn't increases the size of Data.fs .

The Blob support for SmartLink is activated only if plone.app.blob is installed. Plone 4 has Blob as storage default for the images and the files. On Plone 3.x you have to install it by yourself.

If you have already created Smark Link contents with an old version that doesn't support Blobs you have to launch a migration utility from the Smart Link control panel.

E.g.: http://myhost/@@blob-smartlink-migration

Migrate ATLink to Smart Link (and back)

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).

Warning 1

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.

Warning 2

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.

Safe re-install, clean uninstall

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.

Plone 3 notes

There's some kwno issues for this product on Plone 3.3:

• uninstall will probably not work (you can try to add to your buildout experimental.backportGS)
• uninstall will restore the Plone 4 style Link
• you must manually activate plone.app.imaging in your Plone site

Before this: ComboLink

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.