Is there a way to have Confluence generate links to external websites automatically on an identifier other than @ or camelCase?

Question

We have items with unique part numbers with all part numbers ending always in '-ND' (ex. 129-555-ND).  Is there a way to have this automatically link without going through the addition of [129-555-ND@identifier] ?  Preferably I'd just like anything that follows the format of 'anything-ND' (spaces are the only delimiter) to retain the text and become an external hyperlink that goes to our search engine.  I supposed the camelCase auto link would be another example of this type of functionality, but obviously not quite what I want.

Is anyone aware of a plugin or resource for developing/modifying such a functionality?

Ben _ · Answer

That looks like it would accomplish my goal as stated.  Thanks for the great idea.  I've tested out something similar now and it more or less does what I want.  The only problem I've discovered now is that SEO value is likely lost when the links are rendered using javasript after the page load.

Greg MacLellan · Answer

@bombledmonk : In your case, the replace line would be something like: .replaceText( /(\S+-ND)/gi, '$1') though I'd recommend being more precise to only link plausible part numbers and avoid false positives (eg, if all numbers were like the pattern you gave 525-446-ND, you could use /(\d{3}-\d{3}-ND)/)

Greg MacLellan · Answer

I did this with a total hack -- would love to see this as a plugin though. I just search for a regex and replace it with my custom HTML (which happens to be a link). I used it to auto-link JIRA ticket numbers, and also to auto-link tickets to our external customer support site (by writing either "ticket 23445" or "#23445"). I used the ba-replacetext javascript by Ben Alman, and then created a javascript file: jQuery.getScript('https://site.com/common/jquery.ba-replacetext.js', function() { console.log('Doing text replacements..'); jQuery('article *') .replaceText( /([A-Za-z]{2,3}-\d{1,5})/gi, '$1' ) .replaceText( /(#|ticket ?)(\d{5,7})/gi, '$1$2' ) } I then modified confluence's `/opt/atlassian/confluence/confluence/decorators/includes/header.vm` to include my file, by adding at the bottom: After restarting confluence, this works great. Of course, the JIRA inbound links don't work but while migrating to confluence, I have a lot of content that already has JIRA issue numbers embedded in the text (that auto-link from our old wiki) and so this at least gives me usable links. I'm new to confluence, but have been using this same method in JIRA for over a year to auto-link support tickets, changesets, build references, etc. The only thing to watch out for is after upgrades, you have to reapply the header change.