A feature that in retrospect seems like an obvious one, but one I _never_ thought of until a reader emailed me about broken links, is that when you reference your own past entries in pMachine with a link…and then you import that site into EE, those self-referential links no longer work.  For some people that can mean a LOT of broken links in a site.

There has to be a way to fix that during import.  After the fact, it’s a LOT of tedious hand-correcting, but there must be a code solution during the import process, no?

Anyway, it won’t help me, but maybe someone could look at this and implement something in the future…

It would be much more difficult to do this than you might think.  In pM you might have made the links either relative or absolute (or absolute with the full URL).  This one’s certainly not insurmountable, it just requires some forethought and intelligence in the parsing/importing.

The problem here, though, is that unlike in pM, there isn’t anywhere in particular that an entry will “live” in EE.  You can display entry content literally anywhere you want in any Template you want with EE.  So, how would EE know where to make new links point?  A possible solution would be to have a single global “make links point to this Template” type setting during import, but what if some of the links should be pointing to one Template and some to another?

Unfortunately, I just don’t think there’s a really good solution to this one as far as solving it programatically goes.  It’s certainly a good idea and I won’t say that Rick or Paul might not have some clever solution at some point, but when I look at the problem I don’t see any good solutions.

This is one case where it would be really great if both products supported an internal links index. It could be like Userland Manila’s “Shortcuts” feature or like WikiWiki links or something entirely new.

Point is, rather than hard coding links into my sites, I would like to have a way to refer to them by title and have the appropriate links automagically inserted. It’s like a search-and-replace operation while the page is rendered.

I think this would help with stark’s problem too, because it ought to be much easier to migrate such a links index between systems.

Jeremy

The problem with that is that, again:

unlike in pM, there isn’t anywhere in particular that an entry will “live” in EE. You can display entry content literally anywhere you want in any Template you want with EE.

There isn’t, implicitly at least, any kind of one-to-one relationship with an entry and a “location” for that entry.

I’m certainly not arguing that the idea isn’t good, Jaharmi.  I’m just saying that it would require some additional layer where the user has to specify - on a per-entry basis - where that entry “lives” so that it could be part of that index for use elsewhere.

I definitely see the trouble in this…and I’m no programmer, so I’ll leave it to y’all experts to say yea or nay.  It’s just something that came up and is a literal nightmare to fix.  I work on a couple of weeks at a time whenever I get the chance.

Two years of pMachine entries…lots of links to fix!  Still worth the upgrade, though.