Another facet of our content macro is the new internal link macro system. Embedded links have always been a struggle when redesigning or maintaining a site. Any changes to a page's file name or URL and embedded links to that page will break. Think of all the times I've referred to other newsletters within the context of another page (I've done this three times already in this newsletter). In our case, because of the friendly file name URL system, every page on our site has a new URL. This also means that every link in the content throughout the site would break. And, in fact, I did have to go through every page and find every instance of internal links and fix them. But now that they're fixed, they're fixed for good! That's because rather than linking to the new URL directly, I used our new internal URL link macro system. With this system I can refer to any page by it's database record number rather than its file name (which can and often does change). The macro system finds and replaces these macros with proper URLs whenever I save my content. I can even change the friendly file name of a page and since I use the link macros throughout the site all internal links will always work. Nice!


It took a whole year. Hopefully, we won't need another redesign for a while, but at least I know that if we did upgrade again in a few years, the job will be much easier with content and link macros. Well, I hope you enjoy the new site and find the content helpful. Again, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

Stay Web Smart.