How to create a link from one article to another in ez publish 3

Monday 29 September 2003 3:15:13 am

Can anyone enlighten me as to how I can link from one article to another using ezpublish 3?

Inserting <link id='xxx'> seems to work in a very limited way. I am able to create links to some articles this way, but not to the majority. Also, it seems that sometimes ezpublish will have rewritten a link-element to an a-element when I open an article for further editing.

Is link the right element to use? What attributes are available and how do I specify the article or object I want to link to? Should I modify any configuration files to make this work?

I was sort of expecting that I could use the related object feature to find articles or objects I want to link to and then insert links into the article using a shorthand notation.

Wednesday 01 October 2003 1:02:01 pm

Vivienne,

Thanks for explaining the object-element. Based on your post I understand this is the main method for including links to other on-site articles and objects.

However, when I use this method on the intranet sample site, links are not shown inline in the current paragraph, but shown as block elements. Also, I can't find a way to set the source anchor text, i.e. the text you click on. (I understand this is taken from the object you link to.)

What I am looking for is a way to generate a hypertext link from one article to another article. The link should be displayed as an inline element, and I should be able to control both the anchor text as well as the title-attribute of the anchor element.

Since writing my initial message, I've done a dive into the ez publish 3.2 code to find a way to achieve my goal. I learnt several things:

It is possible to have an object xml element displayed inline in the current paragraph. The file ./design/standard/templates/content/datatype/view/ezxmltags/object.tpl contains a hint on how to do this in the following comment from the file:

Set variable to true if the object should be rendered
as a block tag. If it should be rendered as inline use
false.
{set-block scope=root variable=is_block}true{/set-block}

I tried this, but it did not work.

I went further into the code and discovered that if I made a small change in kernel/classes/datatypes/ezxmltext/handlers/output/ezxhtmlxmloutput.php the is_block variable from above took effect.

What I did was to change this line:

if ( $tpl->hasVariable( 'is_block', 'xmltagns:ContentView' ) )

into this:

if ( $tpl->hasVariable( 'is_block', 'xmltagns' ) )

The change has to do with what namespace hasVariable() checks for presence of is_block. I'm unable to tell if this is a simple typo, or what the full story is here.

After making the change above, I am now able to control via templates if object-elements are displayed inline in the current paragraph or as a separate block-level element.

The next thing I would like to see is a way to control both the anchor text and the title attribute of the html a-element. As far as I can see the ez publish xml object element does not support a title-attribute, but I could be wrong on that. What I would like to see is that the object-element supports two attributes, title and text. The text-attribute can be used to hold what will become the anchor text of the html a-element.

I would love to hear comments from people who really know the ezxmltext code and what the plans are for further development of this module.