In the content operation of AnQiCMS, we often need to automatically convert text links or email addresses in the article body into clickable hyperlinks.urlizeA filter is a very convenient and commonly used tool. However, many users might be curious about, thisurlizeDoes the filter attempt to verify the validity or accessibility of these URLs while converting links?

In short, the answer is:will not.

urlizeThe core responsibility of the filter in the AnQiCMS template is text processing and formatting, not network-level validation. Its main task is to intelligently identify strings in the text that match the URL or email format, and then wrap them in HTML's<a>Make it clickable link in the tag.

For example, when you use in the article content.{{ content_variable|urlize|safe }}such code, ifcontent_variablecontains "https://en.anqicms.com, www.kandaoni.comEven text like “[email protected]” such as this,urlizewill be converted to something like<a href="https://en.anqicms.com" rel="nofollow">https://en.anqicms.com</a>or<a href="mailto:[email protected]">[email protected]</a>a hyperlink.

One very practical additional feature is,urlizeIt will automatically generate these external links<a>Label addrel="nofollow"

Then, why?urlizeDoesn't perform URL validity validation? The main reasons are performance and design philosophy. Imagine if every time the page is rendered,urlizeThen the page loading speed will be unimaginable if you make network requests to all the identified links (such as, checking DNS resolution, trying to establish TCP connections, even initiating HTTP GET requests to determine if the link returns a 200 OK status).This is contrary to the project advantages of AnQiCMS pursuing 'small, with very fast execution speed', 'high-performance architecture', and so on.

This real-time validation requires DNS queries, TCP connections, and even complete HTTP requests, which is impractical and inefficient for a lightweight filter on the server-side template rendering level.The goal of the template filter design is to quickly transform and format data, rather than to perform time-consuming and network-dependent operations.

This means, even ifurlizeSuccessfully converted the text “bad-link.com” to<a href="http://bad-link.com" rel="nofollow">bad-link.com</a>This link may still point to a non-existent website, an offline server, or a blocked resource.urlizeIt is just a text-based pattern matching formatting tool that does not have the ability to check links.

Therefore, as a user of AnQiCMS, we useurlizeBring convenience while also being aware of its limitations. If the quality of the website content and user experience have strict requirements for the effectiveness of the link, we cannot rely on it alone.urlizeOn the contrary, other strategies should be combined to ensure the health of the links, such as:

  • Content review mechanism:Check the links included in the content manually or automatically before publishing.
  • External link detection tool:Regularly use specialized third-party tools to scan the website, find and fix broken or invalid links.
  • User feedback:Encourage users to report any invalid links they find.

In short, AnQiCMS'surlizeA filter is an efficient and convenient text processing tool that allows us to quickly convert plain text URLs into clickable hyperlinks and automatically addnofollowProperties to optimize SEO.But remember, its responsibility lies in the presentation of content, not in the validation of link effectiveness.Understanding this allows us to better utilize the powerful features of AnQiCMS and also manage website content more effectively.

Common Questions (FAQ)

1.urlizeWhy doesn't the filter perform URL validity verification?

urlizeThe filter is mainly used to format text during the template rendering stage, converting strings that match URL or email patterns into HTML hyperlinks.If it validates the URL's validity or accessibility every time, it will involve network requests, which will greatly increase the server's burden and significantly reduce the page rendering speed, conflicting with the high-performance goal pursued by AnQiCMS.Therefore, its design focuses on fast text conversion rather than time-consuming network verification.

2. How to ensure that all external links on the AnQiCMS website are valid and no dead links appear?

AlthoughurlizeDo not verify the link, but you can manage and ensure the validity of the link in the following ways:

  • Manual check before publishing:Before content is published, key links in the article are manually clicked and verified by content editors or reviewers.
  • Use external link detection tools:There are many online tools or desktop software that can regularly scan your website, identify all external and internal links, and report broken links (e.g., Screaming Frog SEO Spider, Ahrefs Site Audit, Google Search Console).
  • Set 301 Redirect:If your website's internal page URL changes, be sure to use the built-in 301 redirect function of AnQiCMS to direct the old URL to the new URL, preventing the occurrence of internal dead links, which also helps with SEO.

3.urlizeandurlizetruncWhat is the difference between these filters?

urlizeThe filter will convert URLs in the text to hyperlinks and display the original URL text in full.urlizetruncThe filter performs the same conversion while also truncating the displayed text of the hyperlink based on the length you specify.If the URL text exceeds the specified length, it will be replaced by an ellipsis (…) for the extra part.{{ "https://en.anqicms.com"|urlizetrunc:15|safe }}It may be displayed as<a href="https://en.anqicms.com" rel="nofollow">https://www.anqic...</a>This is very useful when the page space is limited.