Symphony.

I have a textarea section in Symphony that is can contain HTML. I would like to create hyperlinks to other pages (in Symphony) but I don’t know the URL that the textarea content will be rendered at, so relative URLs will not work.

Is there a way I can use a parameter to get the absolute path to a page? I tried putting this in the content but it didn’t work.

<p><a href="{$root}/{$current-page}/about">About the site</a></p>

The parameters are not expanded :(

Off the top of my head… one way might be to do it in your XSLT if you really want to keep them relative.

<a href="about" class="relative">Blah</a>

And then something like…

<xsl:template match="a[@class = 'relative']">
    <a href="{$root}/{@href}"><xsl:value-of select="." /></a>
</xsl:template>

Would that work?

Just to clarify, czheng’s example requires the use of the Ninja Technique The code can be found in the XSLT Utilities section: http://getsymphony.com/downloads/xslt/file/20035/.

Thanks for the push in the right direction. I ended up going with a modified version of @czheng’s solution to save on typing.

<!-- Properly base URLs so they work -->
<xsl:template match="@href | @src" mode="html">
    <xsl:attribute name="{name()}">
        <xsl:choose>
            <xsl:when test="contains(.,'://') or starts-with(.,'/')"><xsl:value-of select="." /></xsl:when>
            <xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of select="concat($root,.)" /></xsl:otherwise>
        </xsl:choose>
    </xsl:attribute>
</xsl:template>

This automatically looks at all @href and @src attributes and determines if they to be rewritten with $root; just like a ninja should! All of the below hyperlinks will resolve to the same location:

<a href="order/incoming/">Open orders</a>
<a href="/~sirlancelot/order/incoming/">Open orders</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com/~sirlancelot/order/incoming/">Open orders</a>

It also works when Markdown is enabled. Example:

### URL Tests ###

  - [relative url][0]
  - [absolute url][1]
  - [full url][2]

  [0]: order/incoming/
  [1]: /path/to/symphony/order/incoming/
  [2]: http://localhost/path/to/symphony/order/incoming/

Is there a good reason that symphony, and many other CMSes use absolute links? Woudn’t it be more simple (and less bytes) to include a base-link in the header of the master template and have all the links relative from there on?

Why do relative links like

<a href="./about">About</a>

not work?

<a href="/about/">About</a>

A leading forward-slash will resolve to the root, so provided you’re not running your Symphony site in a subfolder, this will work, meaning you don’t need to add $root.

So the root is detected by symphony as the root of your public folder? In the case you have it installed in a subfolder, it still doesn’t resolve to the root of that subfolder, but to the root of your public folder?
In that case why not declare a global param real-root and add:

<base href="{$real-root}">

in the head, and use

<a href="./about">About</a>

wouldn’t this be more elegant?