Plugin request: link directory

[SirRobert]

Hello community and developers,

for some time now I thought about a cool link directory plugin for serendipity that allows you to easily manage a big (or small) directory of links in different categories and subcategories. Let’s begin with the features.

Each link consists of:
* the Link title
* the Link-URL
* the Description of the link
* (optional) a Banner / logo / image (you can add via the media database)
* the Category of the link
* the ‘date added’

More options:
* display link (yes / no)

Optional features:
* hit counter
* top 10 (or x) links by hits
* the 10 (or x) latest links
* deadlink checker

Options in the admin navigation:
* Edit link (/ category)
* Delete link (/ category)
* Add link (/ category)
* Possibility to sort them alphabetically or by categories
* Display only 30 links per page

More features:
* nice permalink structure of the categories
* easy styling with smarty template engine
* clean css design, parsable by searchengines

I considered on how this plugin could be developed. I think the basic structure of this plugin does not differ so much from the usual news-entries. Basically, one link entry is not much more than a collection of what we call “CustomFields” in the usual news-entries. The “linktitle”, “LinkURL”, “Description of the link”, “Banner” etc. should then be easily accessible by smarty, that we can put them into a template file.

Moreover, we could possibly use the available category structure of the news-entries to sort and organize the link entries. (or how do the developers think about this?) It would be great if we could then structure the link directory with nice permalinks like this:
myblog/links/friends/
myblog/links/recommended-shops/books/

I think I am not able to develop this plugin by myself. But I wanted to post this suggestion to ask what the community thinks about such a plugin and if there are more people demanding for a link directory.

I think, this plugin would be a great enlargement for serendipity, since link exchange is an essential feature to build link popularity. The link directory is something like the ‘heart’ of the social network of each blog. I know too many blogs that have terribly long link lists in the sidebar...

Let me know what you think about it or if you have any suggestions. Let’s see if we can find a developer(team). It would be great if we could call this project to life.

Best Regards,

Robert

P.S.: Finally, this plugin could also be used on the “who is using” site on s9y.org

P.P.S.: BTW here some (arbitrary) examples of link directories:
http://www.dexigner.com/directory/cat/R ... ic_Design/
http://www.phpfive.net/links-3-web-development.htm
http://www.kingofurl.com/

[mgroeninger]

Actually, a lot of that functionality is built into the backend of the Linklist plugin. I even have an old version of a page output plugin laying around some where that displays links in a single page, similar to static pages, etc. (Just a list, sortable by category, date entered, alphabetical, etc.)

Unfortunately, it is really, really old so it doesn't use smarty (or even the permalink system).

The biggest problem with this approach is that a user would not be able to use both linklist and the linkpage plugin at the same time.

I would suggest a new plugin (serendipity_event_linkdirectory??) that uses serendipity_event_linklist (and just the event plugin) as a basis to start from.

I am going to be tied up for the next week or so (holiday) but I might be able to take a look at this after my other stuff is out of the way...

If no-one else picks it up feel free to ping this thread again to remind me (I will try to remember, but I'm not always that sharp... *grin*)

[SirRobert]

Hi Matthew,

thank you for your feedback!

It's a good idea to use the event_linklist as a base to start a new plugin called serendipity_event_linkdirectory.

The linkist provides many features that we will need for the linkdirectory plugin - especially the backend supplies a good navigation that can probably be enlarged quite easily (?). I also saw that you already created a custom category system - this makes things much easier.

An important step will be to outsource the output code via Smarty to clean up all the HTML out of the code..

keep us up to date - otherwise I'll remind you

Greetings, Robert

[SirRobert]

Hello to Matthew and the community,

I was browsing through the german Forums and I suddenly discovered an entry by Falk, talking about an "event_bookmark" plugin. This really turned out to be a linkdirectory!!

This plugin is not official, but you can download it on this (psst! secret ) CMS-plugin site:

http://s9y-cms.fadoe.de/plugins/

I found this plugin running on the site of Robert Lender:
http://www.robertlender.info/blog/plugin/links

The good news is, that this plugin already uses smarty to design the link and category entries!

the bad news is that I don't get it to run on my installation. Falk says in the german Forum, that you have to call it via myblog/plugin(s)/bookmarks/ (you can chose this URL in the plugin). I tried everything, but I always get a 404 site. I'm running s9y 1.1 beta 5. Has anyone experience with this or knows why this doesn't work?


I also have two feature-suggestions for this plugin, but maybe I have to ask Falk himself about this:
a nice Peramlink structure for the categories
(* edit) a Live-Screenshot of the linked site!
an extra text field for sth. special (e.g. rating, sitelanguage etc.)
Number of links in a category (like http://www.dexigner.com/directory/)

I'm grateful for any feedback about this!

Regards, Robert

[SirRobert]

Hello guys,

just a short correction of my last entry:

The Plugin does work with the usual URL structure of serendipity, which I seemed to forget for a moment

serendipity/index.php?/plugin/bookmarks/

Best Regards,
Robert