Broken Link Checker for WordPress

Sometimes, links get broken. A page is deleted, a subdirectory forgotten, a site moved to a different domain. Most likely many of your blog posts contain links. It is almost inevitable that over time some of them will lead to a “404 Not Found” error page. Obviously you don’t want your readers to be annoyed by clicking a link that leads nowhere. You can check the links yourself but that might be quite a task if you have a lot of posts. You could use your webserver’s stats but that only works for local links.

So I’ve made a plugin for WordPress that will check your posts (and pages), looking for broken links, and let you know if any are found.

Download it now! (423 KB)

Features

  • Detects links that don’t work and missing images.
  • Periodically checks links in posts, pages, comments and the blogroll.
  • New and modified entries are checked ASAP.
  • Notifies you on the Dashboard if any problems are found.
  • Lets you edit all instances of a specific link at once.
  • Gives you a list of all links ever posted on your site, with the ability to search and filter it.
  • Lets you apply custom CSS styles to broken and removed links.
  • Highly configurable.

The broken links show up in the Tools -> Broken Links tab along. If any invalid URLs are found a notification will also show up on the Dashboard widget. To save screen real-estate, the widget can be configured to stay closed most of the time and automatically expand when broken links are detected.

Installation

Install “Broken Link Checker” just like any other WordPress plugin :

  1. Download the .zip file.
  2. Unzip.
  3. Upload the broken-link-checker folder to you /wp-content/plugins directory.
  4. Activate the plugin in the Plugins tab.

Download

broken-link-checker.zip (423 Kb)

Requirements

  • WordPress 3.0 or later
  • MySQL 4.1 or later

The current version of this plugin is only compatible with WordPress 3.0 and up. If you have an older version of WP, try one of the older releases. Specifically, version 0.8.1 is the last one that’s still compatible with the WP 2.8 branch, and version 0.4.14 is the last one compatible with WP 2.1 – 2.6.x.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, August 5th, 2007 at 22:59 and is filed under Applications, Blogging. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1,243 Responses to “Broken Link Checker for WordPress”

Pages: « 1 … 21 22 23 24 25 [26] 27 28 29 30 31 … 42 » Show All

  1. 734
    Steve Portigal says:
    October 17, 2009 at 20:04

    re: 809

    My ISP upgraded the CURL library. I checked the plugin’s debug info:
    PHP version 5.2.5
    MySQL version 5.0.41-community
    CURL version 7.19.5
    Snoopy Installed
    Safe mode Off
    open_basedir On
    Redirects may be detected as broken links when open_basedir is on.
    Lockfile /tmp/wp_blc_lock

    however. I see that open_basedir shows as on, but Support has denied that it’s actually turned on. They referred me to http://jade.rahul.net/~ldhesi2/info.php which lists config info for the server, in which I see that open_basedir has “no value”

    So the CURL issue is dealt with, but I’m not sure about the open_basedir situation, and meanwhile, I rescanned everything and there are no redirects showing.

    Thanks for your ongoing help with this!!!

  2. 735
    White Shadow says:
    October 17, 2009 at 21:15

    Regarding open_basedir, the plugin just reports what PHP tells it. I’ll make it display the value it sees for the open_basedir setting, maybe that will provide some clues.

  3. 736
    Dingoe says:
    October 18, 2009 at 12:00

    I noticed that your broken-link-checker is not internationalized. Please consider to do so, it’s not much work and might widen your range of fans ;-) . I made a start by adding a domain name to your __(‘textstrings-to-be-localized’) and the 1 _e(‘textstrings-to-be-localized’) you have in your broken-link-checker.php page. Not all english terms are hereby translated though. You might want to look at the http://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers/ page.

    I uploaded the edited broken-link-checker.php, together with the broken-link-checker-nl_NL.po and mo file in a zip file to:
    http://rapidshare.com/files/294540358/broken-link-checker.zip

  4. 737
    gaianorm says:
    October 18, 2009 at 12:31

    HI,
    I agree with dingoe, as I told you some weeks ago… i can also add Italian po file.
    byez
    G.

  5. 738
    Steve Portigal says:
    October 19, 2009 at 19:53

    re: 817

    Here’s what the debug info says now (after your update)

    PHP version 5.2.5
    MySQL version 5.0.41-community
    CURL version 7.19.5
    Snoopy Installed
    Safe mode Off
    open_basedir On ( /home/portigal/:/tmp:/usr/local/lib/php/ )
    Redirects may be detected as broken links when open_basedir is on.
    Lockfile /tmp/wp_blc_lock

    Interesting (to my naive self) that the open_basedir is giving a different readout here than http://jade.rahul.net/~ldhesi2/info.php which says “no value”

  6. 739
    White Shadow says:
    October 19, 2009 at 20:04

    Interesting, yes.

  7. 740
    Steve Portigal says:
    October 20, 2009 at 04:56

    I was able to check /usr/local/lib/php.ini

    [relevant lines, via grep, but I can get more of the file if need be]

    ; open_basedir, if set, limits all file operations to the defined directory
    ;open_basedir =

    So there’s no value set there. But I suppose something else could be changing the setting – another plugin, something in WP, etc. I don’t really know what it is or if that’s even possible, but I wonder if that’s a source for investigating?

  8. 741
    White Shadow says:
    October 20, 2009 at 12:58

    According to PHP docs the open_basedir directive can only be set in php.ini and httpd.conf in your version of PHP. You’d need at least PHP 5.3.0 to set it from a script, so I’m fairly certain plugins/WP can’t change it in your case (PHP 5.2.5).

    Maybe open_basedir isn’t the problem here. You could try (re-)enabling redirect detection manually : comment out lines 161 and 163 in link-classes.php like this :

    //if ( !blcUtility::is_safe_mode() && !blcUtility::is_open_basedir() ) {
	curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
//}
  9. 742
    Tinh says:
    October 20, 2009 at 13:01

    I tried to deactivated and reactivated the plugin but the error on the table is still there

  10. 743
    White Shadow says:
    October 20, 2009 at 21:39

    Did you get an error when reactivating (you should have if it couldn’t create the table)? If yes, what was it?

  11. 744
    Dingoe says:
    October 21, 2009 at 10:29

    for my own WordPress blog I have rewritten the broken-link-checker.php file and made my own broken-link-checker-nl_NL.mo file. I will post this rewritten file and the broken-link-checker.pot file in a zipped file on Rapidshare for those who want a localized plugin.

    http://rapidshare.com/files/295841715/broken-link-checker.zip

  12. 745
    Wordpress plugins for affiliate websites : Travel Affiliate says:
    October 22, 2009 at 00:54

    [...] Broken link checker – Helps my users and is good for SEO by identifying broken links within my sites. From the dashboard you can unlink or edit the link to something that will work. [...]

  13. 746
    Asmodiel says:
    October 23, 2009 at 00:08

    Hi there!

    The Problem with the open_basedir as I’ve written above is not really fixed with the last update. While using the proposed ini_get(’upload_tmp_dir’); it works… Maybe you should really consider changing it :)

    I could write a german and polish localisation…. :)

  14. 747
    White Shadow says:
    October 23, 2009 at 01:14

    Interesting. As a test, could you try switching the order the plugin tries the directories like this (around line 2220) :

    $path = ini_get('upload_tmp_dir');
if ( $path && is_writable($path)){
	return trailingslashit($path) . 'wp_blc_lock';
}
 
//Try the system-wide temp directory
$path = sys_get_temp_dir();
if ( $path && is_writable($path)){
	return trailingslashit($path) . 'wp_blc_lock';
}

    The reason I’m reluctant to implement your suggestion exactly as written is because it doesn’t account for other users’ situation. (What if someone doesn’t have an upload dir. set? What if it gets automatically cleared at inopportune moments? Etc.)

    So I see there’s great demand for localisation(s). Okay, I’ll get started on that sometime next week :)

  15. 748
    Michael Garmahis says:
    October 23, 2009 at 22:57

    I installed this plugin but it immediately paralyzed both backend and frontend. I’d better use Xenu’s Link Sleuth for now.

  16. 749
    steve portigal says:
    October 24, 2009 at 01:47

    re: 823
    (more naive questions, sorry) Where do I find link-classes.php? It’s not part of the WP install as far as I can tell…

  17. 750
    White Shadow says:
    October 24, 2009 at 01:51

    It’s one of the plugin’s files, in wp-content/plugins/broken-link-checker/.

  18. 751
    Steve Portigal says:
    October 24, 2009 at 08:29

    Well, I tried that. I rechecked all links and then I created a post with http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com which redirects to http://www.portigal.com/blog

    1. Post published on : October 23, 2009
    2. Link last checked : October 23, 2009
    3. HTTP code : 200
    4. Response time : 0.215 seconds
    5. Final URL : http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com
    6. Redirect count : 0
    7. Instance count : 1

    1. Log : === First try : 200 ===

    HTTP/1.1 200 OK
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
    Expires: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:26:05 GMT
    Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 05:26:05 GMT
    Cache-Control: public, max-age=0, must-revalidate, proxy-revalidate
    Last-Modified: Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:44:07 GMT
    ETag: “5bd197ab-8424-4f4a-aacb-ebb0252da666″
    X-Content-Type-Options: nosniff
    X-XSS-Protection: 0
    Content-Length: 0
    Server: GFE/2.0

    Link is valid.

    Debug info:
    PHP version 5.2.5
    MySQL version 5.0.41-community
    CURL version 7.19.5
    Snoopy Installed
    Safe mode Off
    open_basedir On ( /home/portigal/:/tmp:/usr/local/lib/php/ )
    Redirects may be detected as broken links when open_basedir is on.
    Lockfile /tmp/wp_blc_lock

    In other words, it didn’t make any difference. No redirects out of my 7000+ links :(

  19. 752
    20 plugins indispensables pour Wordpress | Tendances du Web says:
    October 24, 2009 at 19:11

    [...] – Broken Link Checker scannera régulièrement vos pages, et vous indiquera, sur le dashboard d’administration, [...]

  20. 753
    White Shadow says:
    October 24, 2009 at 19:49

    http://chittahchattah.blogspot.com uses a META redirect, which is not directly supported by CURL and similar libraries.

    But that still doesn’t explain why other redirects wouldn’t show up, and I’m running out of ideas. Khm. Okay, here’s one more test – download this archive, unzip it, upload the test_redirect.php file to your server and run it. It should output a bunch of information; paste it here.

    The script is basically a greatly simplified variant of the link checking code that tries to load http://w-shadow.com/redirect302.php – a page I created specifically to test redirects – and displays various information about the result(s).

  21. 754
    Steve Portigal says:
    October 24, 2009 at 20:00

    Thanks – Note that I still have the commented-out version of link-classes.php

    Fetching http://w-shadow.com/redirect302.php

    Warning: curl_setopt() [function.curl-setopt]: CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir is set in /home/portigal/domains/portigal.com/public_html/test_redirect.php on line 10

  22. 755
    Steve Portigal says:
    October 24, 2009 at 20:01

    HTTP Header(s)
    HTTP/1.1 302 Found
    Date: Sat, 24 Oct 2009 16:58:40 GMT
    Server: Apache/2.2.13 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.13 OpenSSL/0.9.7a mod_bwlimited/1.4 PHP/5.2.10
    X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.10
    Location: http://w-shadow.com/
    Vary: User-Agent,Accept-Encoding
    Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

  23. 756
    Steve Portigal says:
    October 24, 2009 at 20:04

    sorry for the multiple comments – the output is in a format that your comment feature doesn’t like, giving me a blank screen upon submit, so I’m snipping out various pieces to see how I can get it to load – I’ll reformat it in Word and see if that helps…

    Response info
    Array

    url => http://w-shadow.com/redirect302.php
    content_type => text/html; charset=UTF-8
    http_code => 302
    header_size => 280
    request_size => 67
    filetime => -1
    ssl_verify_result => 0
    redirect_count => 0
    total_time => 4.325351
    namelookup_time => 4.165701
    connect_time => 4.244815
    pretransfer_time => 4.244826
    size_upload => 0
    size_download => 0
    speed_download => 0
    speed_upload => 0
    download_content_length => -1
    upload_content_length => -1
    starttransfer_time => 4.325252
    redirect_time => 0

    CURL version info
    Array

    version_number => 463621
    age => 3
    features => 1565
    ssl_version_number => 0
    version => 7.19.5
    host => x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu
    ssl_version => OpenSSL/0.9.8b
    libz_version => 1.2.3
    protocols => Array

    0 => tftp
    1 => ftp
    2 => telnet
    3 => dict
    4 => ldap
    5 => http
    6 => https
    7 => ftps

  24. 757
    White Shadow says:
    October 24, 2009 at 20:34

    Right. That warning there – “CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION cannot be activated when in safe_mode or an open_basedir” – is a clear indication that open_basedir is enabled, and thus redirects don’t work. I was uncertain before, but not any more – this particular error message is generated by PHP itself when a script tries to do something that’s not allowed by the server config.; it can’t be a bug in the script*.

    I’ll add a workaround for situations like this. Redirects will show up in the report, but you’ll have to check each one manually to know where it redirects to (because the plugin still won’t be able to follow the redirect).

    * That sounded ambiguous. What I mean is the error message shows that the server config. really prevents the plugin from following redirects, as opposed to the plugin just incorrectly thinking it can’t follow them and giving up.

  25. 758
    Ricky Buchanan says:
    October 25, 2009 at 05:57

    Thank you for this unbelievably useful plugin. I’ve used it almost since it was first released and find it really wonderfully useful on my blogs for isolating sites I’ve linked to that have since died or moved. The growth in the plugin during the last 2 years has been spectacular too!

    I’m not sure if this is possible, or if it’s just me, etc., but the one thing that really bugs me is that when I’m editing a URL on the broken links page that I can’t just press ‘enter’ to save the changed link – I have to manually click ‘save link’. I am forever forgetting to do that because it seems counterintuitive that ‘enter’ doesn’t work.

    The only other tinsy tiny problem I have is that I’d like more documentation – I’m never quite able to remember the differences/effects of “unlink”, “discard”, and “exclude”. Could we have tooltips perhaps for these? I know I’ve looked up the effects a few times but the names aren’t obvious to me so I keep forgetting.

    Again, thanks for the hard work you put in – it’s greatly appreciated!
    r

  26. 759
    White Shadow says:
    October 25, 2009 at 11:22

    Alright, I’ll see if I can make Enter work in that textbox.

    The action links do have tooltips – you just need to hover your cursor over one of them for a few seconds to make a one-line description of the link’s function pop up. This works in all the major web browsers (Firefox, Opera, IE and even Chrome).

  27. 760
    Ahmed says:
    October 25, 2009 at 23:48

    Thanks ,great plugin

  28. 761
    Ricky Buchanan says:
    October 26, 2009 at 03:28

    Ahh – guess the tool tips must be a Safari thing then, it just says “javascript:void(0);” for all the tooltips. Thanks again :)

  29. 762
    Что делать, когда плагины Wordpress ведут себя не так как хочется? | Эксперименты WEB-дилетанта says:
    October 26, 2009 at 18:17

    [...] Почему этот «вредитель» (речь идет о плагине  Broken Link Checker ) так действует — ума не приложу. Регулярно [...]

  30. 763
    Maskil says:
    October 26, 2009 at 20:19

    Hi,
    Please could you update the Changelog on the WordPress.org Plugin Page? It’s still sitting at Version 0.5.16.
    Thanks.

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