Easily Link to Content using Linkit in Drupal 8

The Linkit module allow site editors to work in a more comfortable way when linking to internal entities (i.e. content, users, taxonomy terms, files, comments, etc.) and when linking to external content as well.

The benefit of the module is that your editors won’t have to copy and paste URLs of content they’re linking to, instead the module provides an autocomplete field, which they can use to search for content.

Linkit works based on a profile system. You can choose as many or as few plugins (linking options) for each profile and then assign each profile to a particular text format. This provides an extra layer of granularity, because the linking permissions are granted in the text editor and not within Linkit. That way you can add multiple roles or just one role to a Linkit profile.

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to configure Linkit by creating a profile and adding a button to CKEditor.

Getting Started

Before we can begin, go download and install Linkit.

Using Composer:

composer require drupal/linkit

Or, Drush:

drush dl linkit -y

Configuring Linkit

To configure Linkit, click Configuration, “Linkit profiles” and then on click “Add profile”.

You’ll be presented with the configuration screen for the first profile. For the purpose of this tutorial, I’m going to create two profiles: one for admin users and one for editors. Begin creating the first Admin profile. Give it a proper name and a description. After that click the “Save and manage matchers” button.

The matchers are just the entity types you’re allowed to link to. Click “Add matcher”, select Content and click “Save and continue”.

The “Results description” textbox helps us build our results in the Linkit autocomplete field in a more organized way through the use of tokens. For example, you can add [node:title]/[node:author].

The “Restrict to selected bundles” options allows us to restrict the search results to a particular bundle. All bundles will be shown in the select results if none are checked.

The “Group by bundle” option lets you group the results in the Linkit search results by bundle. This is an advantage if you have lots of content because you can search in an organized way. I’m going to include unpublished nodes, since this is the “Admin” profile. After choosing all options click “Save changes”.

Let’s add another matcher for the admin profile. We’ll assume that the admin user is allowed to link to User profiles while the editor profile won’t.

Configure the “Result description” ([user:created]/[user:account-name]) as shown in the image below and click “Save changes”.

You have now two matchers in your Linkit profile. You could add all of them if you want to. Now it’s time to configure the link attributes. Click the “Manage attributes” tab on the right.

This functionality allows you to add additional attributes to the link. Click the “Add attribute” button and choose the Title attribute. Click “Save and continue.

Check the “Automatically populate title” option and click “Save changes” once again.

You can add as many attributes to your links as you want. The procedure is exactly the same as with the matchers.

Add Linkit Button to Editor

Now that you have created a Linkit profile, it’s time to add the button to the editor. Click Configuration, “Text formats and editors”. Choose the Full HTML format and click Configure on the right.

Remove the default Link button from the active toolbar and add the Linkit button instead.

Your toolbar should look like this:

Scroll down a little bit and you’ll find a “Linkit” vertical tab. Click and choose the profile you configured in the last step.

Click the blue “Save configuration” button.

Now it’s time to create a node and add some links pointing to another article and to a user profile.

Test Linkit

Click Content, “Add content”, Article. Write a proper title for you article and write some text in the body section. Make sure the “Text format” of your current editor is set to “Full HTML”, otherwise you won’t be able to see the Linkit button.

Highlight some text and click the Linkit button. If you type in the letter a for example in the Linkit modal, you’ll see all items that match that letter. These items will be grouped by bundle (when it’s about content). Also you’ll see the users that match that particular letter. Notice that the search results are presented according to the “Result description” (with tokens) that you configured in the Matchers section.

Choose one of the options, the Title attribute will prepopulate itself with the node title. Highlight another word or phrase and link it to some user. Save the node. Test now that your links point to the right node/user.

Summary

The Linkit module will save your editors time because they will no longer have to manually find content and the URL to link to. Linkit allows them to find and create links directly from the editor without having to leave the page.