Overview
Cocoon has various tools to ensure the internal links. However, there will
still be occasional problems. Please help to keep it robust.
External links are a bit trickier. It is not really fair to banish them just
because they were not accessible on the day that a link verification was run.
Actually the external link situation is going to become an
issue, now that we have accepted a whole section of
Cocoon Links
docs devoted to external resources.
Robust internal links is the main issue. However, how far
do we go down the road of external link management? Please help to develop
automated solutions.
Assessment tools
build docs
Please do "build docs" before creating or committing a patch. The build will
fail on internal breaks. (Not sure about links to and within Javadocs.)
LinkStatus Generator
This Cocoon Sample will start at the home page of the local documentation
webapp and traverse each internal link, reporting its status in a colour-coded
table.
See Cocoon Samples in your
local webapp distribution via
http://localhost:8080/cocoon/samples/linkstatus/
(v2.1 only)
LinkAlarm web service
| We cannot rely on using the LinkAlarm service (a fee-based professional
service). We need to develop our own capability.
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The excellent LinkAlarm service is used after each public release of Cocoon
to help discover any broken external links on the final website.
Please see the README file at
linkalarm-readme.txt
and help to attend to any issues.
The LinkAlarm service traverses the Cocoon website occasionally. The full
set of reports are at
http://reports.linkalarm.com/373104199608/
There is a new webapp sample that retrieves the summary report
links.broken.txt and pretty-prints the list.
See Cocoon Samples in your
local webapp distribution via
http://localhost:8080/cocoon/samples/linkstatus/
(v2.1 only)
Further development
We need to take more advantage of the capabilities of Cocoon's LinkStatus
Generator. Perhaps this can be incorporated into a custom build target for
docs.
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