What it does

When you save a document the system looks at it and gathers all references it finds. References are both links to other web pages (internally or externally) and embedded images.

Broken references are shown in the 'broken links' portlet. Links which are affected by the reference management are colour coded in the following ways:

green

Everything is fine, the reference is ok

orange

The reference is temporarily not available, meaning it could just be available again at a later time. Reasons for the orange states are for example name resolution problems or 'Internal Server Errors'

red

The reference is broken and will most likely not come back. A web server returning 'File not found' is one reason for this.

grey

Grey refernces are either not tested (yet) nor not testable at all. Not testable are amongst others email addresses or javascript links.

The colour coding even affects the content area:

After saving you get imediate feedback about the references the server already knows about. This is if you link to http://www.gocept.com for instance and you (or somebody else) has done so before you will see if it is reachable without any delay.

References which are unknown yet, are scheduled for checking [1]. When a result is known, it's shown in the portlet and links overview.

Author's overview

Content authors have two overview pages.

Links of a Certain Object

My Links

The 'My Links' actions shows all broken links in the objects you have created, grouped by their state (red, orange, grey)

Manager's overview

The 'Link Management Overview' gives a high level overview about the site. It refers to pages which show links by state and documents by state.

What it does

Every object which is being referenced shows this via a new portlet, the "referenced by" portlet, which looks like this (click to see it in context)

Another way of recognising whether an object is being referenced is a new icon in the folder listing. [2]

Limits

For several reasons there is no automatic updating of broken references, yet. Automatic updating means for instance that when you rename a document, all references pointing to that document are magically updated.

The problem with this approach is the edge conditions.

1. May be you do not want the refernces update because you just want to replace that document.
2. You might not have write permissions to the referencing documents.
3. How does this relate to workflows?

We decided to leave it with the user to care for those issues for now.