Sitecore Broken Links and Content Editor Issues

0
votes

We've been noticing an increase in number of broken links on our sitecore website.

Some it is due to

  1. User Training
  2. Publishing Issues (linked page is not yet published)
  3. Maybe content editor issues

It's been hard to verify some of these but sometimes the link might have the authoring page URL (which means someone didn't follow the SOP), sometimes they have a strange url like /shell/Content Editor/...

So we are trying to proactively fix these before the pages go live.

I had a couple ideas like writing a Handler that would look through all "Rich Text Fields" and looking for inconsistencies (like authoring server URL). Also using a crawler-type of validator could help us (http://home.snafu.de/tilman/xenulink.html#Description) but we were wondering what the community was doing to address this issue.

The "internal link checker" usually works well but doesn't detect many of this erroneous setups (as I believe it sees them as 'external links').

Your input is greatly appreciated!

3
sitecoresitecore6

3 Answers

1
votes

I would suggest a new Validation Action added to the workflow command before the items are finalized. Then you could actively stop them from being published and give immediate feedback. If you're not using workflows, you could add a new item level validator, but those often get ignored in my experience -- too many false positives on the existing validators.

3
votes

If you have RichText fields and create internal links, your internal link looks like this in the HTML view: "a href="~/link.aspx?_id=EB3AD128E7BF4F3C9F3812F701D7724E&_z=z" and when you hover with your mouse over it, is show "/Sitecore/Shell/Controls/Rich Text Editor/" before the ~/link.aspx. This is normal behavior. This link is modified to a normal link during rendering of the RTE field.

However, be sure to use the Sitecore controls like to render these RTE fields and to render links. Also using sc:fld() in XSLT instead of sc:field() can create strange links because sc:fld is rendering the raw value of the field.

In all of the Sitecore projects I have been working on, I didn't have much issues with broken links.

2
votes

There is a known bug with copy-pasting links from a rich text editor, where path info is appended to the link (generating the /shell/Content Editor/ stuff). Sitecore have a fix for it here:

http://sdn.sitecore.net/Products/Sitecore%20V5/Sitecore%20CMS%206/ReleaseNotes/KnownIssues%20Recommended/Copying%20and%20pasting%20link%20in%20rt%20fields%20may%20break%20the%20link.aspx