Feature Proposal: Suppress links to topics that are not in the published scope.

Motivation

IMHO this change adds a lot of polish to the generated output.

Description and Documentation

Background: I'm using the PublishPlugin to create a software manual as a team wiki effort, then publishing the web as HTML for distribution to the clients. We're using a new Documentation web for this content, but there are inevitably links to other webs (notably to Main for usernames and System for help/search/etc.

Problem: The published pages contain links to pages in other webs which are not published, and those links are simply broken and lead to a poor customer experience.

Feature Request:

• Add option Suppress links to nonpublished topics: only create any internal hyperlink in the published pages when that hyperlink's target exists.
  • Definition: an internal hyperlink is a reference to any Foswiki topic inside the current Foswiki installation.
  • This would only work for internal links.
  • I don't expect the plugin to check external links.
  • I don't expect the plugin to check if those other webs may have been published.
  • I do expect the logic to apply to links written as normal WikiWords and also to [[][]] formatted links to internal targets.
• (Lower priority) Add option Suppress links to non-existing topics: don't render internal links if the target does not exist.
• Consider if both of these should be turned on by default.

Examples

• To create better customer-quality output, when the readers shouldn't be confronted with the wiki origin of the content:
  • Check the box Suppress links to nonpublished topics to ensure a clean appearance.
  • Uncheck the box Suppress links to non-existing topics to ensure a clean appearance.
• To create an offline reference to be used by the authors, when the readers know about the wiki and understand that there may be broken links:
  • Uncheck the box Suppress links to nonpublished topics to provide a fuller context.
  • Uncheck the box Suppress links to non-existing topics to make the readers aware that there are unwritten topics waiting to be written.

Impact

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

-- Contributors: TorbenGB - 06 Aug 2010

Discussion

This is for a non-default extension, not part of the release process. This discussion should really be part of PublishPlugin

Changing this to a brainstorming topic and will point to it from PublishPlugin

-- Main.GeorgeClark - 24 Mar 2017 - 03:07