URL Management

Broken links serve quick notice to web visitors that either the site is not being updated regularly, or the webmaster does not know what they are doing. Broken links are a big turnoff for the casual visitor in other words. Checking for broken links should be a regular maintenance item on any site.

eZ is mountainous rich in features -- and documentation of these features. So much so, that casual users may never realize the powerful link checking capabilities.

Basically every url written into the site content in eZ, gets stored as simply a url within the database. This makes link checking dead simple either:

• one link at a time from the Admin->Setup->URL Management window by clicking the "open" links for each url
• running the linkcheck.php script to automatically check and mark urls valid or invalid
• running the cronjob script which calls the linkcheck script

From the eZ 4.0 doc .. "Every address that is input as a link into an attribute using the "XML block" or the "URL" datatype is stored in a separate part of the database. Actual data stored using these datatypes only contain references to entries in the separate URL table. This feature makes it possible to inspect and edit the published URLs without having to interact with the content objects. The addresses in the URL table can be checked by running the 'linkcheck.php' script"

The url management section in Admin->Setup simplifies repairing urls, by treating them like any other kind of editable content. References to where the url appears within site content are maintained, making it easy to check how the url fits into the content, or if it is only found in archived content.

The Old Ways

Simplest -- check the site when someone goes to the trouble to complain about a broken link.

Proactive -- Load the entire site contents into a powerful integrated developmernt environment (IDE) that can search the html and script files for urls. Then test each url in turn, alter as necessary.

Thanks

Thanks to the eZ developers, yet one more onerous site management task has become about as dead simple, easy to manage, easy to automate as possible.