External website links only showing as text not links

[sunshinemike +]

Hi

I'm probably doinf something very silly but my site at Wedding Yellow Pages has just gone 'live' and I have noticed a problem.

When a customer places a listing their website URL is shown in the ad but not as a clickable link - just a text string.

Have a done something wrong or do I need to change some code.

Many thanks

Mike McCann

[Mike-N-Tosh +]

That most likely reason for this is that the end user is not putting in the "http://" at the beginning of the URL which is what tells the browser that this is a full clickable link.

-Mike

[seymourjames +]

I just looked at your site and I do not see the problem as most links appear to have been entered correctly.

Links should take this form when you look at the source:

<a href="http://www.thedomain.com" title="some title text" >some more text</a>

This is a correctly formatted link with minimum attributes. Often you and in your case you will see it like this

<a href="http://www.thedomain.com" title="www.thedomain.com" target="_blank">http://www.thedomain.com</a>

It is the first http:// part of the code that does the work.

[sunshinemike +]

Thanks

That is exactly the problem ! I think the user should be warned when entering a website URL that it MUST start with http://

I wanted to change the text displayed in userjoin.tpl (via english.php - LANG_EXT_URL") to say Please ensure link starts with http:// but then realised this text is also displayed in viewlisting.tpl so have had to add an extra line in english.php

define("LANG_EXT_URL", "Link to your website - must start http://");
define("LANG_EXT_URL2","Link to your website");

... and call the first in userjoin.tpl and the second in viewlisting.tpl

Works fine now

[seymourjames +]

That is a very good idea. Well done. Many do not realize that they can add new constants to their language file and use them throughout in their templates.

[Eric Barnes +]

Just to add to this in v4.1.0 we have included better checking that they enter a full url. To prevent this.