Applications

If your site has been around for a while, a few or many of the pages you've linked to in the past may have ceased to exist or moved to new locations. Also, if you tend to link to a large number of pages, you might not be in the habit of clicking on each and every link to check it, so some URLs might not have been valid in the first place. The CheckLinks plugin tries to access all the URLs linked to in your entries (or a subset of your entries), and lets you display a list of the ones it can't successfully access.

These tags are intended to be used on an index template, most likely one you don't display to readers, but one you periodically rebuild so you can look over the results. Since trying to access all the links is a time-consuming operation, you'll probably want to turn the "Rebuild this template automatically when rebuilding index templates" option off for the template on which you place the CheckLinks tags.

If a URL has already been accessed successfully within a given instance of MTCheckLinks, the plugin will not attempt to re-check it if it encounters another link to the same URL. This should speed up execution if you tend to link to the same URLs repeatedly.

Please note that simply because the plugin identifies a link as bad doesn't necessarily mean it's bad; it's possible a site was just momentarily inaccessible. You'll have to investigate the "bad" links yourself and determine how to handle each on a case-by-case basis.

The CheckLinks plugin keeps track of the HTTP status line returned by each unsuccessful request it sends. The status includes a three-digit code (for example, 404 means the page was not found on the server) and a textual description of the error. With the MTIfBadLinks, MTIfNoBadLinks, and MTBadLinks tags, you can restrict the listing of bad links to those with particular status codes. An explanation of the codes can be found here.

Installation

To install the CheckLinks plugin, upload the file CheckLinks.pl to the plugins directory within your Movable Type directory. If you do not already have a plugins directory, create one before uploading the file. For more information about Movable Type plugins, see the documentation.

The CheckLinks plugin requires the LWP::UserAgent Perl module. This module is used by Movable Type for some optional functionality, and MT's documentation has instructions on how to install it if it's not already installed on your system. (To find out whether it's installed, you can run MT's mt-check.cgi script.)

Support

Please use the support forums for all support requests, bug reports, feature requests, questions, and comments regarding this plugin.

MTCheckLinks

This container tag is the master tag that tells the plugin you're going to be checking links and collecting bad links. All other tags in the CheckLinks plugin must go within MTCheckLinks.

Within MTCheckLinks, first use MTCheckLinksHere to indicate the entry text containing the links to check, and then use the "BadLink(s)" tags to display the results of the checking.

If you want to create a single listing of bad links for multiple entries, MTEntries should go within MTCheckLinks. If you want to display each entry's bad links separately, MTCheckLinks should go within MTEntries, as in the following example:

<MTEntries>
 <p><b>Entry:</b> <$MTEntryTitle$><br>
 <MTCheckLinks>
  <MTCheckLinksHere>
   <$MTEntryBody$>
   <$MTEntryExtended$>
  </MTCheckLinksHere>
  <MTIfBadLinks>
   <b>Bad links:</b>
   <MTBadLinks>
    <br><$MTBadLinkURL$> (<$MTBadLinkStatus$>)
   </MTBadLinks>
  </MTIfBadLinks>
  <MTIfNoBadLinks>
   <b>No bad links found</b>
  </MTIfNoBadLinks>
 </MTCheckLinks>
 </p>
</MTEntries>