Working with links

Into the big wide world

It is fairly easy to add links to other web sites to a piece of text. Open a text editor for the piece of text (paragraph, heading, etc.), highlight the piece of text you want to link from and click the link icon in the menu bar of the editor. This is shown in the inset picture. That will bring up the link dialog shown below, which lets you type in or paste the the link url. If you copy and paste a typical web page url from your browser URL bar itno the URL box, the link dialog will generally figure out what to do. It needs the URL split into the protocol part (usually http or https) and the other part (usually beginning with www). If it gets this wrong, you might have to tweak this by choosing the correct protocol from the dropdown menu and/or deleting the protocol from the part in the URL box. Once you have the URL in the llink dialog, pressing OK will enter the link into the text you are editing.

Don't forget to save the text you are editing after entering the link. If you don't do this, your link will be forgotten.

Keeping it in the family

You can also add links to pages within the site. Although this can be done as above, by copying and pasting the URL into the URL box of the link dialog, there is a better way. This method uses the internal name of the page.  You can discover or change the internal name this by going to that page and pressing the icon. Once you know the internal name, go back to where you want to place the link,

1. Bring up the editor for the text, select the piece of text you want to link from and click on the link icon (see above).
2. Choose the protocol Other in the drop down menu.
3. Type "?page_name=xxx" in the URL box, where xxx is the internal name of the page to which you are linking.
4. Press OK and you are done.

It is always a good idea to set the internal name for the page to which you want to link to something sensible - something you can remember. The default name will be something like 'page_xxx' where xxx is a number.  Internal names are case sensitive and it is a bad idea to use characters other than letters, numbers and the underscore symbol ( _ ) in them.

Email is easy

To add email links, simply choose Email in the Link Type menu of the link dialog. The dialog will then guide you on the information required for an email link. Clicking an email link created in this way will typically open the user's email client and create an email to the email address you specify with the subject and body you specified (if any).

And finally, getting rid of them

To unlink a piece of text, up the editor for the text, place the cursor anywhere in the link and click on the unlink icon that appears just next to the link icon. Don't forget to save the text!