Good new and bad news, folks.
The bad news is my employer refused to let me write a LinkWizard replacement. The good news is that I sent Oracle a reasonably comprehensive report about link management - what the problems are and what the solutions might be.
Naturally my first recommendation was to replace the LinkWizard. A new version should take any URL entered by the user and convert it into a SiteStudio link. This kind of pre-processing would eliminate common mistakes, like entering a SSPU-published URL. I even supplied a new interface that does away with the "wizard" style of annoying steps and offers an intuitive "properties" style interface. I also recommended they junk AJAX and just use a simple (fast) IDOC/JavaScript combination.
I then suggested that ssLINK tokens should be enhanced to include the file format of the target. This would allow a contributor to link to a content item and choose the web page version, PDF version or the native file version, without having to be trained in copying URLs from the Content Information page.
Next I proposed a "friendly" URL solution where horrible Content Server URLs like /content/groups/public/documents/doc/contentID.pdf could be replaced with intelligent URLs like /about/link-management.pdf. Wouldn't you love that!
I had a couple more suggestions including upgrades to the LinkManager component. I have no idea what will come of the report but here's hoping that they will do something about links.
