Fastest Way to Find and Link to a CP on a Page?

Question

I have three linking related questions followed by some background.

After explaining SDL Tridion linking behavior, I often get asked, "as a Content Author, how do I link to a specific page?"

1. Knowing a URL, what's the fastest way to link to a CP on that page as a CMS user?
   

   I'm thinking:

   1. Start XPM in Staging
   2. Click on the CP or open the page's form view
   3. Jump to that location in the CME

   Where Used is about as fast. Am I missing a faster approach while creating the link?

2. I think (or think I heard) Page URIs are actually managed as of 2013 SP1 in rich text format areas. Is that right and would page TCM IDs be Content Portable?

3. If so, what about links across publications? I'm thinking this won't work--don't all publication IDs in the context of a Publication have to be the same?

As an implementation option, I can imagine a Custom URL or other extension that literally converts a Staging or Production URL into a Component Link.

Background

SDL Tridion component linking depends on three things:

1. The template for the linking Component (make <tcdl> link)
2. Template priorities
3. The proximity of the linked Component as a Component Presentation embedded (dynamically or statically) on a published Tridion Page (which I've tried to summarize)

Authoring Approaches

My recommendations have included:

• Link to components on pages, typically the ones that contain page content ("SEO" or "main" editorial component)
• Use naming conventions to match pages and these components, possibly helped with the event system or Page Types that use the %P% placeholder (so copied components have the page's name)
• Use similarly-named folders and search
• Have developers set template priority so a "main" CP has high priority to represent the page you want to link to

Hopefully authors will be familiar with their content model and be able to find the right components, but I don't always get to revisit an implementation after training and design.

Any other explanations or implementation approaches? I'm not necessarily avoiding author-controlled page linking, but with multiple child publications, I can't see how you'd pick which publication to link to (page "master" publications?). Needing to somehow handle such links in child publications seems hackish as well.

Answer 1

I'm not sure if I really get your questions, but let me try and give an answer to numbers 1-3.

1.

If you know the URL you can use that in your href attribute, if you know the URI, you can use a Dynamic Page Link, for instance with TCDL:

<tcdl:Link type="Page" origin="tcm:5-199-64" destination="tcm:5-206-64" 
       templateURI="tcm:0-0-0" linkAttributes="" textOnFail="true" 
       addAnchor="" variantId="">Home</tcdl:Link>

2.

2013 SP1 allows an xlink to any item, so that would include Pages and yes any xlink is a managed link and thus can be Content Ported.

3.

Cross Publication linking is not supported on the CM or CD side, however it is know to work on the CD side (because that is not in a CM context, so you can link to any valid URI from any Publication).