Creating Links - A Guide
Posted by
Peter on 11th March 2007 at 06:28pm Creating links is part of the backbone of the Internet. Within an article you create a link using one of several different methods. This is
not an instruction manual for using the Links Manager.
The easiest way is to click on the link button and follow through the prompts. This inserts code that will look something like this -
[URL=http://www.templedene.net]Your link text[/URL]
These links open into a new window or tab automatically. We adopted this way of doing links to conform with the BBCode standard. You can select some text first and it will use the selected text instead of prompting you for any.
However, we also kept in place the old way of making a link which is to use
[LINK]http://www.st-theresas-school.org.uk[/LINK]
You will occasionally find this old method still has it's uses, as the way it is parsed by the BBCode to HTML generator makes it useful, for example, for use in box headers and footers. Again this type of link opens in a new browser window or tab.
Internal Links
Within an article, you can use the PAGE tag to link to other pages within the same article, so you would have something like -
[PAGE=3]Your link text[/PAGE]
This would produce a link to page 3 of the current article. As with the URL tag you can select some text (or not) and click the Page Link button.
You can also use the PAGE tag to create a link which opens in the same window, this could be an internal or external link.
[PAGE=http://www.av.com]Your link text[/PAGE]
You can also auto index an article. This is useful if you have a very large article split over several pages. Simply insert :
[INDEX]
As your article grows you will see the index dynamically build itself.
The INDEX feature also indexes H1 and H2 tags to provide a comprehensive table of contents for any article. You can see this at work
here on a school web site we did.
Why do we have so many ways of creating links? Well it is so your system can be as flexible as possible. The INDEX tag is especially useful if you are producing multi=page newsletters, as on the school web site, example above.