Happy New Year!!!
We’re starting the new year with a new category of posts – CitySoft Tips. In here we will post answers to the questions we get most frequently from clients. The most popular question this holiday season – by far – has been “How do I link directly to a document?” Here’s how:
March 2009 Update: This method is for public documents only. Do not use for password protected documents.
- First you will need to get the document on the server. You will do that in the Content Tab, then the Documents section. Click “Add New Document.
- On the first screen, enter the title and other meta data about the document and click next.
- On the next screen is where you actually upload the file. Click the “Add format” link at the bottom of the screen and follow the directions to upload the file.
- Now the document is on the server and it can be accessed via a web link. To determine what the web link is, you will need to click on the document name in the document list and in the “Formats” section at the bottom you will see the name of the file you uploaded. That is PART of the web link, let’s pretend it is “mydoc.pdf”.
- The other component of the web link will be the path to the file which is a little tricky. For your main site, the path is /_data/n_0001/resources/live/. For any subsites you have, the path will be a little different. For instance the path for your first subsite will be /_data/n_0002/resources/live/. So, if you are trying to link to the “mydoc.pdf” file on the MAIN site, your web link will be “/_data/n_0001/resources/live/mydoc.pdf”
- Now, if you want to create a link to this document from a page on your website, you will go to the editor for that page, enter some text on the page (i.e., “Click here to download”), highlight that text, right click, and choose “add link”.
- In the URL area in the popup window, you will paste “/_data/n_0001/resources/live/mydoc.pdf”, the path to your file.
- Save the page and your link should be working properly.
2 Thoughts Contributed to “Linking directly to documents in CitySoft”
What do you think?
By Chris Murray
President
Chris has started several companies and been involved in sales, marketing, and product development strategy for several others. He has spent nearly fifteen years working with web technologies on projects of all shapes and sizes.
The only problem with this approach: the document downloads will not be included in Citysoft’s internal statistics on Document Views.
Hi Wiebke – You bring up a good point. There are actually two potential issues with this approach:
1. As you found, the downloads won’t get counted in the reporting system
2. A document linked to in this fashion will be 100% public, so you should NOT use this method for a document that is member-only or otherwise password protected.