Link to external and internal pages

Hi there
I sure hope the possibility to link to external and internal pages will be included in the next RC.

This is such a must have feature to me and my users. Anybody else missing it?

Markus

Dear Ivan
Dear Radoslav

Do you have a timetable on this?

Markus

Hello Markus,

The possibility to link to external page is in our plans for Q1 or Q2 of 2011. Deciding on the timing of the implementation will depend on its popularity of this request in the community.
What we support currently is the ability to link to an external page in the Navigation widget. That said, in your navigation you can include links to external pages.

I am not quite sure what you understand by linking to internal page. If you mean the ability to set a page to redirect to another Sitefinity page - this is planned for Q1. Let me know if you had another feature in mind.
What we support in 4.0 already is the ability to link to internal page from content editor (i.e.content block widget) and the ability to link to any internal Sitefinity page in the Navigation widget. 


Best wishes,
Kalina
the Telerik team

Dear Kalina

In 3.7 when you hit creating a page you could choose

1) Normal Page (you create a page)
2) Page Group
3) External Page (Would automatically be included in the navigation)

So

a) Is the third option a feature you are planning for Q1, or Q2?
b) The same way I can (or could) link to an external page I want to link to a existing page within Sitefinity.

Kind of

Product A (a.aspx)
Product A1 (a1.aspx)
Product A2 (a2.aspx)
Contact (contact.aspx)

Product B (b.aspx)
Product B1 (b1.aspx)
Product B2 (b2.aspx)
Contact (contact.aspx)

As you can see Contact would link to one and the same page contact.aspx.

I would love to be able to set this the same way as external pages in 3.7.

I guess I have to look at the Navigatino widget. I was assuming it would just take the pages as in 3.7 and create the menu accordingly.

Markus

Hello Markus ,

Thanks for the clarification.

The Navigation widget currently offers the following options :
1) to display navigation based on the SiteMap (the pages and ordering is defined in section Pages)
or
2) to display navigation based on a custom selection of pages (you set what pages to include and in what order in the Navigation controls, you can include both internal and external pages). I am attaching a screenshot.

You can use option 2 as a workaround for the effect you want to achieve.
The disadvantages of this approach is that the navigation is static.  It is good approach for context navigation within a page.

As to your questions:
>> We will have external pages in either Q1 most probably. The exact timing will be decided after the official release.
>> For linking to internal pages it is recommended that you use approach 2 above.

We will research other ways to achieve the effect you desire as well.

Greetings,
Kalina
the Telerik team

Thanks Kalina

One of the feature in 3.7 I was missing the most was the possibility to link to internal pages.

At least I had the option to external pages - which of course you will deliver after 4.0 is released (Sorry but the longer I read threads the more I think it should be 3.9)

You can not link to external pages form the navigation unless you make the menu kind of static. Sound like a step back to me, not?

Again

Developer Productivity, Increased by 70% 

to me would mean that I don't have to custom build something that should be from a end user viewpoint be easy.

If internal pages are not included then I either have a static menu or I end up with my own programmed solution which would cut back on my productivity and to the added price tag would even add more cost because I have to do some more programming.

I wonder if I am the only one with the need to  link to internal pages from the SiteMap.


Markus

PS

The possibility to link to external page is in our plans for Q1 or Q2 of 2011. Deciding on the timing of the implementation will depend on its popularity of this request in the community.

So if you have any demand to be able to link to external pages (as you could in 3.7) as well as to link to internal pages - Please speak up - NOW!

Hi,
Being able to easily merge external .aspx pages with the sitefinity menu system is certainly a missing feature, and going in a direction of creating and importing a user control for every small ASP.NET page that don't fit the CMS framework right from the start is an unnecessary complication. Maintaining a static menu seems like a step backwards when it all should be kept together inside Sitefinity's builtin sitemap structure.
So when it comes to external as well as internal page references on the navigation system, please give us some new hope for the fortcoming version.

Best regards,
Torbjorn

@Torbjorn

Thanks for speaking up. I hope a lot of more people will "complain" about missing featurs from 3.7 in the upcomming 4.0 and the community will start a strong demand for this.

@all others
How do you handle this today in 3.7?

Markus

PS: Telerik has proven to be flexilble and listening to the customers/community so speak up!

Hi all,

You are correct - Telerik listens to community and clients. Also, we understand better now how the static menu can be a big restriction.
The issue is logged to our Feature Requests system (#100134) and we will try to implement it in Q1.
This is how we envision this to work:
1) User goes to add a new page, he sees an option to set this page as a "Redirect Page"
2) User is asked to specify if the page to redirect to is a) external or b)internal
if he chooses a), he will have to enter the URL address of the external page
if he chooses b), he will be asked to select a page from the Sitemap

I hope this will address your needs.
Let us know if you have any comments.

Regards,
Kalina
the Telerik team

Dear Kalina

Thanks for giving hope, and prove once again that you are listening. However I for one would love to have the same features available from 3.7 in 4.0 and not just in 4.1. Also we will try to implement it in Q1 just leaves a bit to much room for my taste. But then again - knowing Telerik I always have very hight expectations.

Have you ever seen the movie Bilko with Steve Martin. After the hoover tank demonstratoin (which was a fake) the one of the superior officer that they would rush this baby right to market. Reminds me kind of SF :-)

From a end-user point of view I rather see it as in 3.7 named

Create page and then an option

Sitfinity Page
Page Group
Link to Sitefinity Page
Link to external page

But thats just me.

Sure would have hoped to have a more finished product on release date but look forward to many approvements which I know will come one by one, thanks to Teleriks superb staff of developers.

Kind Regards Markus

Hi Markus,

The focus of the Sitefinity 4.0 release is to offer a powerful foundation and platform for future development.
Since we are already there, adding all  additional features which bring value to the community will happen at a very fast space. As you know, Telerik always strives to deliver more than expected.

I will watch the Bilko movie but it is not accurate to associate Sitefinity with a fake tank. Sitefinity is a powerful and fast tank. We just need to add more guns to it. 

Sincerely yours,
Kalina
the Telerik team

@Kalina

I hope you did not get me wrong on the Bilko remark. It was not ment in anyway to express negative feelings. I just love the movie and the tank could do a lot of stuff (it could acctually hover)

I know Telerik will again deliver more then we can expect (just not on January 14th :-))

Have a great weekend and thanks for putting up with me.

Markus

@Markus, I feel your pain! The more I work with SF4, the more I realize that they've removed features that were there in SF 3.x (i.e. External Pages, Forums, Newsletter Module, etc). I'm starting to think it shouldn't be Sitefinity 4.0 but a different product name completely and not version 4, but based on current release more like ver 0.5 (not RC). The fact that I can't migrate a single one of my current Sitefinity 3.x sites because fundamental chunks of technology that was there have been removed is extremely frustrating. Oh, but yay, I have analytics that I already had over at google, great trade off...

My client also requires the external page link.  I guess I still don't understand why it was removed, most websites have at least one link in their menu that goes to a different site. 

Does anyone have a good workaround for now until it's fixed?  The migration tool basically converted all of my external redirect pages to page groups with "- Missing External" appended on to the end of the name.  This also makes no sense...how can one equate an external resource with a page group?

Our client wants to go live with 4.0 as soon as possible, but I'm afraid that this is a deal breaker to facilitate their navigation requirements.  I've already had to write a custom control to render the menu the way they want it, but I'm relying heavily on the site map data source that Sitefinity is integrated with...any ideas?

Thanks for the forum, I'm glad I'm not the only one searching for a fix...

Sam

Hi ,

We will have external pages support after the official release. We will start working on this next week so you will see the feature available soon. Currently you can add external link to NavigationControl Widget, but this will be just a link to an external page rendered by NavigationControl.



Greetings,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

As a quick workaround I put this in the Advanced options of the page.

<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="0;url=/pagenametoredirect" />

It seems to work!

Hi,

External pages support is included in the latest internal build of Sitefinity 4.0.

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Is that the build - Sitefinity Q1, 2011- due in the week of April 4 ??

Hi Laura,

I think Ivan is referring to these builds: http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-4-x/general-discussions/sitefinity-4-0-internal-releases-for-developers-only.aspx

However there was no new internal build published on Friday so maybe it's in that build. These builds are pretty useless to most users as they're for testing purposes only and should NOT be applied to live sites as they could have breaking changes that will prevent future updates from being applied.

If I'm not mistaken I think there's supposed to be an update this Friday that can actually be used that will have all of those internal build fixes, this is not the same as the Q1 SP build due early April.

Hope that helps.

Cheers,
Phill

Phill, Thank you very much! That does help a lot. -Laura

Hello Laura,

The new features will come with SP1. In the internal builds we added only small bug fixes.

All the best,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

I'm not seeing this feature in Sitefinity 4.0 SP1.  I don't see the ability to add custom pages to the nav widget nor to create "external pages" like in the older versions of sitefinity.  We're migrating a static site and have external pages and scripts that need to be stand alone.

Hi TexKen,

Sorry, this will come with Q1, not the SP1 which includes only bug fixes.

All the best,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

Is there a work around for this?  Can we at least bypass Sitefinity's control over the entire site and hardcode links to external pages for now?

Thanks.

Hi TexKen,

I believe the work around is to create a page in Sitefinity and either drop a custom control on it that redirects or use the meta tags to do a redirect there to your external page. A terrible solution but it should work. If anyone else has better options please jump in.

Cheers,
Phill

That won't really work for us because we're using ajax to post to another asp.net page that updates the database.  Its a very classic POST mechanism using Jquery, not an asp.net postback or web service or anything.

I've been searching the user documentation and forums and I'm really surprised if this is the case, but is it true that I can't add external links and also have a page appear multiple places without any work around? 

For example, I might have a page called "Building Permits" that is a subpage under "Town Law in Codes" as well as a different section of the navigation under a page called "Online Permits".  I don't want this to be a redirect or have duplicate content.  This seems like a pretty common feature. 
 
Also, external links are more self explanatory, but certainly has to be a common feature. 

Hello,

If you take a look several posts above, you will see that we will have support for external pages and additional urls with Sitefinity 4.1 (Q1) release.

Best wishes,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team

We also had the issue of not being able to link external pages so here is what we did

After the menu is loaded we find the menu item and add the NavigateUrl and Target as in the code below.
You can use different ways to find the item but as long as you dont have two pages with the same name then this should work.

Hello Bart,

If we are talking about custom controls, you can expose public properties to enter url to external resources and bind the menu to SiteMapDataSouce control.

Kind regards,
Ivan Dimitrov
the Telerik team