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AutoLink

Questions answered by this recipe

How can I have a particular word, name, or phrase automatically display as a link to a particular site?

Description

automatically displays any specified word, phrase or name as a link, throughout the entire site.

Notes

autoLink.phpΔ displays any specified word, phrase or name as a link, throughout the entire site. To enable this recipe, create SiteAdmin.AutoLink and add your names and urls one-per-line, in the format:

	john doe|http://johndoe.com
	jane doe|http://janedoe.com

Note that:

• all names as declared here must be completely lowercase in order for this to work - all subsequent conversions of names-to-links on your actual wikipages are case-insensitive...
• adding spaces around the pipe "|" may result in an error:
  • correct:   name|url
  • possibly problematic:   name | url
• you can comment out individual lines by adding # or // to the beginning of a line
• a different pagename or group can be used to store autolinks by declaring something like $AutoLinkPage = 'Site.AutoLink';

Then in config.php, include the recipe via:

	# enable autolink recipe:
	include_once('cookbook/autoLink.php');

Names and phrases can also be defined in config.php instead of (or in addition to) posting them on SiteAdmin.AutoLink, by simply declaring $AutoLinkArray['name'] = 'url' before including the recipe. For example:

	# reminder: all keys must be completely lowercase in order for this to work!
	$AutoLinkArray['john doe'] = 'http://johndoe.com';
	# enable autolink recipe:
	include_once('cookbook/autoLink.php');

Note that AutoLink replacement can be prevented by preceding any word or phrase with the backtick (`) character. For instance `John Doe will display as John Doe - minus the backtick, and without any auto-linking. If you'd prefer a different escape-character, or would like to use multiple escape-characters, you can supply it via $AutoLinkEscapeChars.

	# backtick (`) and forward-slash (/) - the latter so that blam.com/name won't trigger
	$AutoLinkEscapeChars = "`\/";

To turn AutoLink off for an entire page, simply add (:AutoLink: 0:) to the page.

In addition, by adding $AutoLinkRemovePrefix = "_"; to config, then any definition with an underscore in front will have the underscore removed later on, for example:

	if you define: _john doe|http://johndoe.com
	then typing _john doe will result in: [[http://johndoe.com|john doe]]

Finally, by default AutoLink causes each instance of a defined word or phrase to be linked. However, autolinking can be limited to only affecting the first instance of each word or phrase by setting in config.php:

	$AutoLinkOnce = true;

$AutoLinkOnce can also be enabled for a single page via the PTV (:AutoLinkOnce: true:). To enable this, add the following to config.php before including the recipe:

	# be able to turn AutoLinkOnce on/off on a page via (:AutoLinkOnce: true:)
	if (PageTextVar($pagename, 'AutoLinkOnce')) {
		if (PageTextVar($pagename, 'AutoLinkOnce')=="true") $AutoLinkOnce = true;
		else $AutoLinkOnce = false;
	}

Example:

Issues

names with ampersands require a special declaration

if you want "jane & john" to always be automatically converted to [[http://janeandjohn.com|jane & john]], you must substitute "&" for "&" in your AutoLink declaration on SiteAdmin.AutoLink:

• works: jane & john|http://janeandjohn.com
• doesn't: jane & john|http://janeandjohn.com

order of declarations

Be careful with your order of declarations on your AutoLink page. For instance, if you want to replace 'John Doe' with a link to http://johndoe.com, and 'John Doe's Workpage' with a link to http://JohnDoeWorkSite.com, you'll need to declare the longer version of the name first, as in:

Release notes

• 2010-02-15 - can now turn AutoLink off per page by adding (:AutoLink: 0:) to the page
• 2009-12-25b - added ability to remove a prefix via $AutoLinkRemovePrefix
• 2009-12-25 - minor change: changed $page var to something less common ($alpage); changed name of markup from 'names' to 'autolink'
• 2009-10-06 - added $AutoLinkOnce capability (a suggestion of Gustav) - autoLink-2009-10-06.phpΔ
• 2009-09-01c - added $AutoLinkEscapeChars to recipe, which permits custom declaration of escape characters (the default being backtick (`) - autoLink-2009-09-01c.phpΔ
• 2009-09-01b - added 'addslashes' and 'stripslashes' to recipe, to fix a problem where apostrophes were preventing autolinking - autoLink-2009-09-01b.phpΔ
• 2009-09-01 - 1) added ability to define autolinks on SiteAdmin.AutoLink; 2) simplified markup to a single line; (special thanks to PeterBowers for help with both 1. & 2.!!) 3) renamed $NameToLinkArray to $AutoLinkArray. - autoLink-2009-09-01.phpΔ
• 2009-08-26 - initial release - autoLink-2009-08-26.phpΔ

See also

• InterMap
• CustomInterMap

Contributors

this code based on contributions by:

• Pm
• EemeliAro
• PeterBowers
• overtones99

Comments

is there a way to declare and maintain a list of names and links somewhere on the wiki, similar to how InterMap does it?

thanks to PeterBowers, this has now been added to version 2009-09-01... overtones99 September 01, 2009, at 09:26 PM

It would be cool if you could specify that only the first instance of a replacement should be replaced per page. That would provide the usefullness of the link without annoying the reader with multiple instances of the link for every mention of e.g. John Doe.

great idea. you can now enable this by setting $AutoLinkOnce = true in config.php. overtones99 October 06, 2009, at 05:48 AM