Thread

I’ll wager that this falls into the category of Doh! but I’ve been pulling my <sparse> hair out over it for two days and hope someone will give me a gentle nudge.

I’m building a site on EE 1.6.4.  Templates are nothing special, but for some reason that eludes me, all links on all pages display as follows:

Link Text(full/url/to/that/link)

You can see the effect in the attached screencap showing Gallery links with the extra verbosity.

In other words, urls are being reported directly in the page layout. (They also appear as you’d expect in the browser status bar when you hover them.) I’ve tested in Firefox and Safari with identical results.

Same browsers behave normally when viewing other sites, including those hosted on the same server. I’ve cleared cache, repaired tables, reinstalled EE, deleted relics of the former site configuration on the server, looked for CP switches that might explain it, and generally exhausted ways of posing questions about this to the Forum, thinking that somebody else maybe experienced it before me. No luck.

What am I overlooking?

Bob Sutton

Hi, Bob.

I’d recommend upgrading to 1.6.6, it’s a recommended security update.

Are you running any sort of extensions? If you temporarily disable your extensions (by clicking the big green button that says Disable Extensions), does the problem still happen?

Thanks, Sue. I’ll do that. There aren’t currently any extensions or non-default modules or plugins in this site, although I’m planning to use the FoxEE commerce module momentarily. I’ll upgrade to 1.6.6 and report results.

Happy New Year!

Happy New Year to you too. We’ll be here!

Have you ever used a markup editor like Markdown or Textile?  That looks really familiar to Markdown shorthand for creating a link though it’s missing some square brackets.

No, but thanks Lisa. I edit templates in external files using Coda, usually directly against “live” versions in my sandbox on a staging server. A couple of these weird links were typed directly into entries via the CP Edit screen, but all the others are dynamic and result from EE tags doing stuff in templates.

I’m stumped. I upgraded to EE 1.6.6 as Sue suggested, but those peculiar anchor links were still there. So then I tore everything down and rebuilt the public HTML directories, reinstalled EE and put my templates back in place.

These ghosts won’t go away. They appear with both linked images and regular inline hyperlinks, almost as if a debugger wants them displayed in the page. They only appear with this one site.

I dismantled and rebuilt the templates several times, confirmed that DOCTYPES are being served, and uninstalled the Gallery module to see if passing links through the module might have something to do with it. Not a clue.

Bob

So if you create a totally blank template with a link, can you give us a link to it?

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Lisa! I just created a new template group, test_group, with a blank template, index.php. Typing the url for that page into my browser produced a blank white page.

Next, I added some simple text copy containing a hyperlink to an off-site page, http://www.test.com, with “Test Link” as link text in the anchor. When I browsed that template using the CP “View Rendered Template” link, the hyperlink appeared normally.

Next, I added another simple anchor pointing back to a page served with one of my EE templates, /gallery/index/. It also works normally.

Finally, I added an EE weblog:entries tag calling a particular field from an entry in my development site. I wrapped that field in an anchor link in my “blank” template. It also displays normally, without the extra “(url)” verbiage. From these tests, I can conclude (as I suspect you already did) that something in my templates caused the crazy links. Before I lure you in deeper, I should remove DOCTYPE and other extraneous HTML stuff from my working templates and test them “naked.”

You’ve cleared my thinking, a big help after two days staring at this!

Bob

It’s my pleasure, Bob.  Definitely time for some serious reduction testing; validating may help as well.  Could be something as blindingly obvious as a missing </a>.  And I do mean blindingly,  I’ve spent 2 days on a similar problem.

Please do let us know what you find out?

Sheepish New Year’s resolution: I will code or drink Lagavulin, but rarely again at the same time after wasting two days reconciling dueling stylesheets.

I use the Blueprint CSS framework to tame layout spaghetti and quickly bring browser inconsistencies to heel. It lets me concentrate on fun stuff in EE. Blueprint provides “baseline” CSS via separate sheets for screen, print, and IE quirks. I usually stick those three in a templates group called “stylesheets” and let the database serve them along with my custom sheet. At some point, I reduced this practice to a snippet of HTML I can pull out of Coda’s Clips bin.

This time, however, while roughing-in some placeholder templates to get a project off my sketchbooks, I used a copy of Coda on another Mac that didn’t have my Clip for stylesheet inclusions. There was football on TV. I was nursing some noble Lagavulin. So I improvised. Oops.

I left out the explicit media=”” declarations, which meant that all of those stylesheets had to compete for attention. Somewhere in Blueprint, a forgotten print style for links overrode my screen behaviors. The templates were doing exactly what you’d want if you printed a page containing link-text: revealing URLs.

Doh!

Bob

Glad Lisa was able to help. Don’t hesitate to post again if needed.