Power Users: Custom Links

One often overlooked feature is the custom links feature. This helps you create entirely new formatting commands that your users can place in pages.

Why would you want to do that? While CourseForum and ProjectForum come with a good number of formatting commands, the number of these commands has been deliberately kept fairly small; each new one that gets added makes the system harder to use and work with. Sure, it's possible to embed HTML into the pages to accomplish pretty much anything you want, but that's not the most user-friendly approach unless your user community are all hardcore engineers.

So you can use custom links to create new formatting that your users may find particularly useful for the type of communication they're using the wikis for (again, keeping in mind that adding things just for the sake of adding them is usually counter-productive because of the learning curve). Some obvious candidates include color, blockquoting, other font changes, and so on.

But you can also do a lot more complex things beyond just providing wrappers to standard HTML markup. Some examples: incorporating standard corporate images or boilerplate text, providing hooks into other communications tools like IM or an issue tracker, and even extracting data from corporate databases. All of this within a wiki page.

Over the next while we'll explore some of the things you can do with custom links, but in the meantime, have a read through our custom links HOWTO to get a bit of a feel for the mechanics of how custom links are created.