Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.Project Description:
Cross linking between nodes would be facilitated through a WYSIWYG module but when linking documents a new window would open allowing the user to browse through existing nodes. A filter feature would allow the end user to filter by typing in the title, taxonomy terms or other words which appear in the document. This filtering could work like iTunes, find as you type searching, displaying results immediatly powered by AJAX. Alternatively the user could browse a hierarchal taxonomy tree. Automatic url aliasing would be required to provide each name with an understandable name and link. An AJAX preview of the teaser text could ensure the proper node was being linked. A feature to further drill down to the Anchors or Headers (h1,h2,h3) in the node would allow for detailed linking of sections within a page.
Project Motivation:
Drupal is very flexible and easy to use for the end user to build documentation and create content. Linking between nodes however is difficult without some previous computer experience. Creating an alias and typing in the url by hand cannot be expected of the average user. Such a module would make Drupal accessible as a tool for a much larger audience.
Some other discussion on a similar topic can be found at http://drupal.org/node/57411
Success Criteria:
Success would be measured by the ease at which an end user would be able to both find the node they wish to link to and the ease of including the link in the document itself.
Roadmap:
Unfortunately I do not have enough knowledge about programing in Drupal to provide a Roadmap but I invite others to add to contribute to the idea and suggest a Roadmap.
Comments on this proposal
use cases
moshe weitzman - April 25, 2006 - 11:45
i'd like to see a few use cases for this. i can't think of too many myself.
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The advantage here is when
nikle - May 1, 2006 - 20:56
The advantage here is when making documentation, you might want to reference another section (ie See Also Section 2). I'm not sure if that provides enough detail?
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much needed
sun - May 8, 2006 - 21:59
+1 for this very much needed proposal.
Use cases
* In a documentation it is best practice to cross-link to needed resources (documentations) which might help to understand or proceed with the actual topic. Although this might be done in a wiki style, but with that you're required to know the exact contents you want to cross-link to.
* For corporate/personal sites it is usual practice to cross-link any information a visitor might be interested in. If you write a content which shall link to several sub-pages you're stuck in requiring the specific node IDs or whatever link you need.
Usability
Currently there is no way to link to other nodes/contents in a drupal site. We've done such a RTE extension for Joomla - displaying all menu items of a site first and after that any contents which are available on the site. Especially the possibility to directly choose from all menu items has been the most valuable benefit regarding usability for our customers so far.
With respect to capabilities of Drupal a cross-linking module should let the author choose to which content/node type she/he wants to link to. One might choose to link to a group/menu item/node/forum topic (or whatever node type the system is capable of) first and then provide an AJAX based selection.
Daniel F. Kudwien
unleashed mind
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much needed indeed
capono - February 5, 2007 - 10:15
In corporate sites I like to refer in articles to articles in another section. Looking forward. I'm not a programmer, just html/css.
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Newspaper application
jbergeron - February 13, 2008 - 17:02
This type of module would be used all the time for newspaper sites to link related articles together.
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