Link management database

I’m looking for a snippet or module to help me manage a large number of external links in my site which will be used in various places throughout the site.

Essentially I’m looking for something that functions in a similar way to the FileDownload snippet, but for links. On a the specific "Links" page, I’d like to be able to list all links, organised by categories, each with their relevent description, and maybe with other useful features such as the number of times the link has been clicked, or a user rating of the link.

I’d also like to be able to display individual links or a category of links on other pages, simply by changing an attribute of the snippet call.

I’d like to be able to style the link display with a template in a chunk, and allow for things such as alternating background colours etc.

Does any resource exist which does something like this? I had a look at the resources with the "links" tag, but found nothing like this there. Also I tried searching the forum, but searching by the keyword "links" returned too many unrelated posts.

Thanks for any help you can offer!

Thanks for the reply. I’m sorry to say, however, that you have totally lost me I’m not a programmer, so html, css and basic modifications to existing php code is my limit.

What are extLinks and extLinksCat? A search of the forums and modx site turned up no results.

The only crud I’m familiar requires me to wash my hands.

I recognise what you meant by "as opposed to having one doc + several TVs per link", but you suggested that was NOT a good way to approach the problem.

Are there any existing snippets I can modify easily to do something like what I’m after, or are there any freeware link scripts online that could be easily meshed with modx that you can suggest?

I’m sorry I’m not able to do anything with your advice, but I’m afraid it’s simply beyond me.

Fantastic, that reply made alot more sense to me Thank you!

I’m not an experienced programmer, but I feel confident that with a lot of reading and experiemnting I could build something like what you describe. I’m sure I’ll have lots of questions, but I can bring them to the forum if folks are willing to help answer.

Since I’ll be building it myself, I’ll leave out the "nice but not necessary" features such as click counts. That should simplify things a bit. I doubt there would ever be more than "several hundred" links, probably less than 300 for a good long while.

I’ll do the reading you recommend, although I’m already familiar with Ditto on a basic level. I’ve used it several times, on a simple to slightly sophistocated basis, so I’m confident I can extend that knowledge to learn what I need for the links database.

A couple of questions that came to me immediately from reading your post. You mention that I would assign the link to a specific template. Are you referring to a site template that is assigned to the links document within the manager, or to a ditto template that is used to format the content of the links when summoned to a ditto call to display the links?

Just as a reminder, I want to be able to call individual links, categories of links, or possibly several categories of links to different pages. It would be great if this could work like the FileDownload snippet, which uses the same template for those uses.

Also, regarding the text document that you describe as being used for the link categories, how would that work? The way I use ditto for articles is that I make subfolders for each category within the Ditto "documents" folder, and I refer to a folder’s ID when calling that category’s articles via a ditto call. You mention that at the end of your post. What advantage would a text file with category names have, and how would I use it?

Thanks a lot for your help. I want to learn how to do this myself, I just need a few pointers to set me in the right direction

Okay, lots of reading and experimenting to do.

I’ll have a go and come back if I have any questions or problems.

Thanks again!