Links Package

The Links Package is a multi-module set for managing URL links in a master directory, and attaching them in various ways to your content pages. It includes both an API for developers and user-visible content modules. This package is released for Drupal 4.7 and Drupal 5.0.

Links offers the following features:

• An API for managing URLs in a generic way, and for associating these links in a many-to-many relationship with nodes. Each link is "normalized" internally, to try to merge references to the same URL in the database. If the same URL is used multiple times, it appears only once but with many node references in the {links_node} table. This helps to make processes such as link monitoring and dead link detection more efficient. The API also allows each link-node association to (optionally) provide an unique node-local title that overrides the global title for that particular URL, but only when that node is being displayed. In other words, the same URL can appear to have multiple different titles.
• A main links.module that governs the behavior of the Links Package's global features, and which implements common functionality such as outlink tabulation of clicks. Click tabulation is by node and link, so that it is possible to find out not only how many times an outbound link has been followed, but also how many times it has been followed from each node that refers to it.
• A links_related.module which allows the administrator to add a link field to any desired node types in the system. Currently, the node type setting is just a boolean flag, and if on, the node can have zero to infinity links. In the next version, however, this will become an integer where 0 means no links for the given node type, +N means "up to N links" for each node of that type, and -N means "exactly N links required (non-empty URL).
• A links_weblink.module which defines a node type of 'weblink', which behaves very much like the node type of the same name by Ber Kessels, and which in fact was based on his module's code base but uses the new links API.

Release Status as of 2008-07-16

The CVS HEAD branch is a work-in-progress to port this package to Drupal 6. It is NOT ready for use yet, but links.module and links_related.module are almost done. links_related is now at a beta level, and links_weblink is at an alpha level.

The July 16 CVS HEAD commit contains important bug fixes to links.inc. If you are testing this pre-release version, you should definitely update to today's release.

Release Status as of 2007-12-11

Version 5--1-8 was released today, with numerous bug fixes. There are still outstanding issues, but this version commits many of the most important patches. All users of the Links Package are encouraged to update to this version soon. There are no database schema changes between 5--1-7 and 5--1-8.

Release Status as of 2007-04-25

Links API is considered stable and ready for use. We may be adding functions in the future, but will try (best effort) to avoid breaking anything that is working now.

The basic functionality of links.module, links_weblink.module, and links_related.module is solid and has been used in production sites. The global links-management screens aren't working yet, but management of links within individual nodes works fine.

The SQL schema for monitoring is in this release, but the monitoring module itself is not yet finished. Monitoring is not a critical-path feature and will probably not be implemented in code until after the initial release.

IMPORTANT: links_admin.module is still in an "alpha" release stage, and is not yet functional. It won't hurt anything to have it on your system, but for now it should be enabled only by developers.

Releases

Official releases	Date	Size	Links	Status
5.x-1.8	2007-Dec-12	159.64 KB	Download · Release notes	Recommended for 5.x
4.7.x-1.1	2007-Jan-29	140.24 KB	Download · Release notes	Recommended for 4.7.x

Development snapshots	Date	Size	Links	Status
4.7.x-1.x-dev	2007-Jan-28	140.24 KB	Download · Release notes	Development snapshot