New Auto Links plugin

Hey all,
Well I’m up to version 0.8beta now. There are some big improvments over the last versions. First of all, all options are configured via the admin panel. No more editing the source code to configure Auto Links.

I also made it much easier to add and remove keywords from your list.

Any feedback would be great!

– Sean

I’ll grab it and give it a shot…. problem is I almost never use “popular websites” in posts….

Oh, btw, is there a way to add to the words that will be linkified? If not, I hereby request same – because that WOULD make this worth my while….

[Edit: ah, yup – read the info, stupid. Thanks, I will definitely play with this….]

Hmph. Amazing. I got this Auto Links working, no problem. Easy, and it works so far. I can happily report it works side-by-side with Identify External Links Plugin, except that plugin does not add the icon to Auto Links’ links (I let Auto Links add its own icon, they’re different but I kinda like that).

I disabled another plugin, Text Replace. I was afraid they’d conflict, especially if I asked for the same term from both. I have an issue. Neither of these plugins will replace the terms “ONE:” and “TWO:” with bolded ONE: and bolded TWO:. As a workaround I even tried asking Auto Links Plugin to replace ONE with a link to https://www.one.com – and even that wouldn’t work. Meanwhile other terms in the same paragraph replace perfectly well.

Is “ONE” and “TWO” some sacred terminology in WordPress that cannot be expressed in PHP??

I’m not sure what that is. I tried both ONE and ONE: and Auto Links linkafied both of them, no problem. Possibly a conflict with another plugin?

– Sean

Possible option for future version.

Would anyone be interested in having Auto Links keep track of which links are being clicked? Then from the Auto Links sub menu it would show you how many times an idividual keyword has been clicked. If enough people are interested in a feature like that, let me know.

– Sean

Thanks for the test and reply Sean. I will try to eliminate other possible plugin conflicts. Could it be something else though?

I have the data stored in a giant plain-text document. I have “SET ONE” and “SET TWO” for a full year, in one .txt

I simply copied and pasted each SET ONE / SET TWO into a WordPress entry.

And neither program will recognize them consistently (sometimes getting the TWO: but not always, it’s weird)… I feel like I’ve got invisible characters in there or something.

i suggest to have a mailing list to keep intrested people updated. I dont like to miss the final version!

I have a little suggestion. How about pulling the favicon.ico and displaying it besides the link?

Good Luck!

by the way, yours is one of my coolest plugins.

Keep up the good work!

I was wondering what will happen if we actually add a link to that first word which auto links is going to link?

Lets test it.

I’m not real sure what you mean about adding a link to the first word. I ran several test, and AL shouldn’t turn linked words into links again.

A newsletter doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I’ll try to set something up on my site.

And I’ll look into an option for having it display the favicon.ico. Although that might be difficult since it’ll have to be converted to gif or jpeg.

– Sean

adding link to the first post means this:
https://www.gangavalli.com/blog/2005/08/04/my-first-post/
You can see that there are repetitions of the word ‘wordpress’ and i have linked the first on to my own blog, then the auto link is linking the second word to the wordpress. will that be ok? just asking!

And good luck with that favicon.ico thing.
would like to see it soon.

Oh, I see. Yeah, AL only makes sure that *it* doesn’t make two links out of the same keyword. If you’ve already made a keyword into a link yourself, AL will just ignore that. I’m not sure if that is desirable or not, or if something should be changed in the plugin. I suppose it should be left the way it is.

– Sean

Sean, I’m loving the plugin. It’s in use on https://dgold.info/radio/

If I had a request for future upgrades, I would suggest allowing a “tree” of links to the same URL, so that 1 company can have 5 nicknames, and still only the 1st occurance would be linked out of any in that parent-nickname relationship. Example,

--The Music Never Stopped.net
--TheMusicNeverStopped.net
--TMNS
--TMNS.net

=> https://www.themusicneverstopped.net/

Right now I have these nicknames assigned, but if I use all 4 in one article, they all 4 get links and link-arrow, to the same URL.

Love the plugin though. It doesn’t conflict with any of my other plugins or linking habits, including Identify External Links which puts the link-arrow by external links I typed, and not by those from your plugin.

For the record, I still can’t get “SET ONE:” and “SET TWO:” to replace with anything else. A mystery to me.

Hi Sean –

Works great! Only a couple little nitpicks: it doesn’t validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict (which is what I validate all my stuff to) because you’re using “_blank” etc. as a targeting mechanism. Could you give me some idea where to edit the php file to target using onclick=”window.open(this.href);return false;” which does validate to strict?

As well, there’s apparently no mechanism (as yet) for including alt and title for the links created, which isn’t kosher either….

Was going to edit, but won’t let me….

Nev’ mind the first thing, sorted it myself. Instead of '" target="' in the php, use '" onclick ="'. And in the field in the Options page, use window.open(this.href);return false; instead of a deprecated target selector. Works like a charm….