Page Links To

About

Page Links To is a plugin that allows you to make certain WordPress pages or posts link to a URI of your choosing, instead of their WordPress page or post URI. It also will redirect people who go to the old (or “normal”) URI to the new one, using a redirect style of your choosing (302 Moved Temporarily is standard, but you can enable 301 Moved Permanently redirects i f you wish.)

For instance, say you have a photo gallery installed, but can’t be bothered to integrate it into WordPress. You’ll still probably want to have a link to it from your WordPress blog. With this plugin you can create a new page called “Photos,” and give it a Custom Field links_to with the value being the URI to your photo gallery. “Photos” will show up when you use wp_list_pages();, but instead of linking to the (blank) “Photos” page, it will link you your photo gallery!

Another usage scenario is that you have content that was on a post, and want to move it to a page. You could redirect the post to the new page. And if you use a 301 redirect, search engines will eventually “find” the new location and change their links.

This plugin uses only two simple MySQL queries, no matter how many total pages or links_to enabled pages you have, so you don’t have to worry about scalability.

Usage

To redirect a page or a post, scroll down to the “Custom Fields” section on the edit screen for that entry and enter in a key of links_to with the value being the full URI you want to redirect to. If you want this to be a permanent move, you can additionally add a meta key of links_to_type with a value of “301″ (without the quotes). After saving the entry, the redirect will be active!

New in version 1.3: Now you can create a links_to_target meta key, and provide the target you would like for the link (like _new, to open the link in a new window). The target you choose will be used in wp_list_pages().

Download

Instructions

Upgrade to WordPress 1.5.1.3 or higher (WordPress 2.0 required for tab highlighting feature)
Upload page-links-to.php to your /wp-content/plugins/ directory
Activate the “Page Links To” plugin in your WordPress administration interface
Create (or edit) a page to have a title of your choosing, and a parent page of your choosing (leave the content blank)
Down below, add a meta key of “links_to” (without the quotes) and give a full URI as its value

That’s it! Now, that page will link to the “links_to” URI instead of its WordPress page URI.

Possible Uses

Linking to an on-site non-WordPress resource (e.g. photo gallery)
Linking to an off-site resource (e.g. Flickr or del.icio.us page)
Placing a link to a 2nd, 3rd, or nth level page on the top level (i.e. you might have /archives/tags/, but want “tags” to show up on the top level)
Adding a link to your blog’s front page without having to modify your template and hack it in manually

Leave any bug reports or feature suggestions here in the comments.

Versions

1.4 Fixes to tab highlighting
1.3 You can now specify a link target via links_to_target, tab highlighting moved to WordPress 2.0 style
1.2 If you link to an internal WordPress page, like a category, the menu item will get the current_item CSS class when you’re on that page
1.1 Posts can have redirects, can specify redirect type (301/302), get_permalink() is filtered for posts.
1.0 Initial public release.

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way. Thanks!

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