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https://insidegovuk.blog.gov.uk/2014/07/02/new-broken-link-checker-for-checking-links-before-you-publish/

New broken link checker for checking links before you publish

Posted by: , Posted on: - Categories: Product changes

We've released a broken link checker feature in Whitehall Publisher.

When creating or editing content, you should run the broken link checker before you publish.

Broken Link Checker

If the checker finds possible broken links in your content, you'll get a warning listing the faulty links:

Broken links found

When you correct the links and save the document, the broken link checker will run again automatically.

The all-clear looks like this:

All clear - no broken links

Things the checker can check

You can run the broken link checker on any documents in Whitehall Publisher.

Right now it's not available on non-documents, eg People, Roles, or on file attachments. We plan to add this later.

Broken link reporting

We're improving the regular broken link report. We expect to run this fortnightly.

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4 comments

  1. Comment by Chris Moore posted on

    Are there any plans to extend this feature to include accessibility checking? These sort of checks could include ensuring heading levels are not skipped, link text sharing the same description do not point to different pages, row or column headings are marked up in tables, graphics have a alt descriptions.

    • Replies to Chris Moore>

      Comment by Lisa Scott posted on

      Hi Chris
      There's lots of ideas around adding more inline alerts for style and accessibility infringements. We have no immediate plans to work on anything like this, although it's certainly something we'd like to consider later. We're carrying out user research at the moment to better understand how people use Whitehall Publisher, and how editing tools such as this could help or hinder.

  2. Comment by Jeni Pitkin posted on

    Hi Lisa,

    This is great. Thanks for adding in this functionality. Is the broken link checker able to distinguish whether links from a Whitehall policy, publication, detailed guide or collection have been linked correctly to another Whitehall content type. For example, /government/admin/policies/12345.

    Thanks,

    Jeni

  3. Comment by Lisa Scott posted on

    Hello Jeni
    Glad it's useful. There is a separate "Link Validator" in Whitehall Publisher which checks for malformed markdown links. Is this what you mean?