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A key feature of wiki-based systems is the ease of creating hyperlinks (or short links) in the text of a document. PmWiki provides multiple mechanisms for creating such links.

Links to other pages in the wiki

To create an internal link to another page, simply enclose the name of the page inside double square brackets, as in [[wiki sandbox]] or [[installation]]. This results in links to wiki sandbox and installation, respectively.

PmWiki creates a link by using the text inside the double brackets. It does this by removing spaces between the words, and automatically capitalizing the first letter of each word following spaces or other punctuation (like ~). Thus [[Wiki Sandbox]], [[wiki sandbox]], and [[WikiSandbox]] all display differently but create the same link to the page titled WikiSandbox. Or in other words, PmWiki will automatically create the "link path name" using the page name in CamelCase, but the "link text" will display in the format you have entered it.

Some PmWiki sites (default not) will recognize words written in CamelCase, called a WikiWord, automatically as a link to a page of the same name.

Links with different link text

There are three ways to get a different link text:

1. Hide link text. Link text within (parentheses) will not be not displayed, so that [[(wiki) sandbox]] links to WikiSandbox but displays as sandbox. For addresses actually containing parentheses, use %28 and %29 https://www.example.com/linkwith%28parenthese%29.
2. Change link text. You can specify another link text after a vertical brace, as in [[WikiSandbox | a play area]], or you can use an arrow (->) to reverse the order of the link text and the target, as in [[a play area -> WikiSandbox]]. Both links displays as a play area.
3. Show page title instead of page name. The use of special characters in the page name is not a problem for PmWiki, but on some servers it may be better to use only plain A-Z letters for the page "name" (which is also a filename), and set the page "title" to the extended or international characters with the (:title PageTitle:) directive within the page. The page title can be shown instead of the page name with the [[PageName|+]] link markup, e.g. page BasicEditing contains the directive (:title Basic PmWiki editing rules:) with the result that a link written as [[BasicEditing|+]] will display as Basic PmWiki editing rules. See also $EnableLinkPlusTitlespaced.
   Since PmWiki version 2.2.14 this works also for those technical pages that have an entry in the XLPage, without the need to add the (:title PageTitleName:) directive within that page (for more details see Localization?).

On top of above ways, a suffix can be added to the end of a link, which becomes part of the link text but not of the target page name.
Note: This feature works with the [[PageName|+]] markup only since Version 2.2.90.

* [[(wiki) sandbox]]
* [[(wiki) sandbox]]es
* [[WikiSandbox | wiki sandbox]]
* [[WikiSandbox | wiki sandbox]]es
* [[BasicEditing | +]]

Links with tool tip

From version 2.2.14 PmWiki can show tooltip titles with the following format:

external link

[[https://pmwiki.org"external tool tip title" | external link ]], eg external link or https://pmwiki.org

internal link

[[Links"internal tool tip title" | internal link ]], eg internal link or Links

Anchor links

[[#name"anchor tool tip title"|anchor link text]] (since Version 2.2.48), eg anchor link text or #name

InterMap link

[[Wikipedia:Wiki"tool tip title"| InterMap link ]], eg InterMap link or Wikipedia:Wiki

Links to nonexistent pages

Links to nonexistent pages? are displayed specially, to invite others to create the page. See Creating new pages to learn more.

Links to pages in other wiki groups

Links as written above are links between pages of the same group. To create a link to a page in another group, add the name of that other group together with a dot or slash as prefix to the page name. For example, links to Main/WikiSandbox could be written as:

* [[Main.WikiSandbox]]
* [[Main/WikiSandbox]]
* [[(Main.Wiki)Sandbox]]
* [[Main.WikiSandbox | link text]]
* [[Main.WikiSandbox | +]]

To link to the "default home page" of a group, the name of the page can be omitted:

* [[Main.]]
* [[Main/]]

See Wiki Group to learn more about PmWiki groups.

Category links

Categories are a way to organize and find related pages. The idea is that every page that falls into a particular subject area should have a link to a shared page containing links to other pages on that subject. These shared pages are created in the special group Category, and thus these subject areas are called "categories".

Adding a page to the category Subject is simple by adding the [[!Subject]] markup somewhere on that page. This will create a link to the page Category.Subject. So [[!Subject]] is a kind of link shortcut to the page Category.Subject. See Categories to learn more.

User page links -- "signatures"

Similar is [[~Author]] a link shortcut to the page Author in the special group Profiles. PmWiki automatically creates this type of link for the current author, when it encounters three tilde characters (~) in a row (~~~) in the page text. The current author is the name found in the "Author" field, when you create or modify a page. The current date and time is appended when four tilde characters in a row are encountered (~~~~).

So, when the Author field contains "Author":
~~~ markup will be replaced by: Author?
~~~~ markup will be replaced by: Author? October 10, 2010, at 04:50 PM

Time format can be modified in local configuration with $CurrentTime.

Link shortcuts

[[PageName|#]] creates a reference link as shown below^[1].

Links to specific locations within a page -- "anchors"

To define a location, or bookmark, within a page to which you may jump directly, use the markup [[#name]]. This creates an "anchor" that uniquely identifies that location in the page. Then to have a link jump directly to that anchor, use one of

• [[#name|link text]] within the same page, or
• [[PageName#name]] or [[PageName#name|link text]] for a location on another page
• The form [[PageName(#name)]] may be useful for hiding the anchor text in a link.

For example, here's a link to the Intermaps section, below.

Notes:

• The anchor itself must begin with a letter, not a number.
• Valid characters for anchor names are letters, digits, dash (-), underscore (_), and the period (.).
• A link to an anchor must have the same capitalization as the anchor itself.
• Spaces are not allowed in an anchor: "[[#my anchor]]" won't work, "[[#myanchor]]" will.
• All anchor names in a page should be unique.

Sections

While in HTML the purpose of anchors is mostly for jumping to a position in the text, in PmWiki they serve an internal purpose, too: Each anchor also creates a section, because sections are defined as the part of the page between their start anchor and the next anchor. For more details, see Page Sections.

Links to actions

To link to a specific action for the current page use [[{$FullName}?action=actionname|link text]].

Examples:

• [[{$FullName}?action=edit|Edit]] for editing
• [[{$FullName}?action=diff|History]] for history.

Links outside the wiki

Links to external sites (URLs)

Links to external sites simply begin with a prefix such as 'https:', 'ftp:', etc. Thus https://google.com/ and [[https://google.com/]] both link to Google. As with the above, an author can specify the link text by using the vertical brace or arrow syntax, as in [[https://google.com/ | Google]] and [[Google -> https://google.com]].

If the external link includes (parentheses), escape these using %28 for "(" and %29 for ")" :

[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiki_%28disambiguation%29 | link to "Wiki (disambiguation)" ]]

The recipe Cookbook:FixURL makes it easy to encode parentheses and other special characters in link addresses.

Links with special characters

To have any special characters, including quotes, spaces, parentheses and pipes in link addresses escape them using [=link address=].

Links from the wiki to resources on the same website

You can use the Path: prefix to add links outside of the wiki but on the same website.

Use Path:/path/to/resource with a leading slash for links relative to the website document root as in www.example.com/path/to/resource.

You can also define a custom InterMap prefix to a specific path on your website and use it as a shortcut, for example:

  Pictures: /assets/pictures/$1

Then in a wiki page, use Pictures:photo.jpg instead of Path:/assets/pictures/photo.jpg or https://www.example.com/assets/pictures/photo.jpg

See InterMap for more information.

Links to intranet (local) files

Not all browsers will follow such links (some Internet Explorer versions reportedly follow them). You can link to a file system by including the prefix 'file:///'. So file:///S:\ProjPlan.mpp and [[Shared S drive->file:///S:\]] are both valid links. On a Windows file system you may want to use network locations (eg file:///\\server1\rootdirectory\subdirectory) rather than drive letters which may not be consistent across all users. Not all browsers will follow such links, Internet Explorer does allow them.

See also Cookbook:DirList.

Link characteristics

Links as References

Links may also be specified as References, so the target appears as an anonymous numeric reference rather than a textual reference. The following markup is provided to produce sequential reference numbering within a PmWiki page:

Formatting the link as: [[https://google.com |#]] produces: [2] as the link.

Subsequent occurrence of the reference link format on the same page will be incremented automatically as per the following example: Entering [[https://pmwiki.com |#]] produces [3], [[#intermaps |#]] produces [4], and so on for further reference links.

But, it should be noticed that the feature is deliberately kept simple and doesn't work as bibliographic references: this supplemental link [[https://pmwiki.com |#]] would produces [5] and not reuse the first link definition.

Intermaps

Inter Map links are also supported (see Inter Map). In particular, the Path: InterMap entry can be used to create links using relative or absolute paths on the current site (e.g., Path:../../somedir/foo.html or Path:/dir/something.gif).

Links that open a new browser window

To have a link open in another window, use %newwin%...%%:

• %newwin% https://pmichaud.com %% produces https://pmichaud.com
• %newwin% [[https://google.com/ | Google]] %% produces Google
• %newwin% [[Main.WikiSandbox]] %% produces Main.WikiSandbox

You can also specify that links should open in a new window via the %target=_blank%...%% attribute:

The following link %target=_blank% https://pmichaud.com %%
will open in a new window.

Links that are not followed by robots

Prefix a link with %rel=nofollow% to advise robots and link checkers not to follow it.

Links and CSS classes

PmWiki automatically gives classes to several types of links. Among other things, this enables you to format each type differently.

Note: This may be an incomplete list.

.selflink

A link to the current page. Useful in sidebars to show "you are here".

.wikilink

A link to another page within the wiki.

.urllink

A link to a page outside the wiki.

Notes

Note: The default behavior of "+" above can be overridden to display the spaced title, rather than simply the title by adding the following to config.php:

  $EnableLinkPlusTitlespaced = 1;

%newwin% https://example.com/ %%

* mailto:myaddress@example.com
* [[mailto:myaddress@example.com]]
* [[mailto:myaddress@example.com | email me]]
* [[mailto:myaddress@example.com?subject=Some subject | email me]]

[[https://example.com/ | WikiWord]]
[[WikiWord -> https://example.com/]]

(:pagelist link=SomePage list=all:)   -- show all links to SomePage
(:pagelist link={$FullName} list=all:)  -- show all links to the current page

(:if exists Group1.Page:)
   [[Group1.Page|Page]]
(:elseif exists Group2.Page:)
   [[Group2.Page|Page]]
(:ifend:)