Adding classes to links in post body for styling

Development

AI-generated summary

The discussion revolves around adding classes to links in a Discourse post body for styling purposes. alank initially faces difficulties in maintaining his desired link format after posting. He shares his attempts using different methods, including the .raw property and Markdown syntax.

alank eventually finds a temporary solution by targeting the top category to apply CSS styles. However, he seeks a cleaner approach to add custom classes to the <a> link.

Johani proposes a solution using a generic BBCode wrapper, which allows adding custom classes to links. This approach uses a syntax like [wrap=custom-button][Link Text](http://meta.discourse.org)[/wrap] and enables styling through CSS using [data-wrap="custom-button"].

alank appreciates Johani’s solution and suggests including it in the API documentation or a central doc for Post property settings.

1

Is there a way to get around Discourse reformatting an Anchor as we would like it displayed as a button and therefore would like a specific style.

the post is posted with the .raw property (I’ve tried to use ‘.cooked’ but this doesn’t seem supported despite what the API states).

posting <a aria-label=“homepage-link” href=“http://blablabla...“>View Homepage</a>

And it is displayed in the Discourse Post.. or Category description as

<div class="cooked"><a>View Homepage</a></div>

I’ve also tried

[View this page][http://blablabla]

And this was converted to:

<div class="cooked"><a href="http://blablabla" class="onebox" target="_blank">http://blablabla</a></div>

However if I could simply have:

<div class="cooked"><a href="http://blablabla" class="onebox" target="_blank">View this page</a></div>

I could possibly target it via CSS from the body element to apply the CSS button style we need.

2

Resolved I think…

[view this page](http://blablabla)

Target CSS using:

body.<insert name of top category here>-* div.cooked a

However

If someone has a solution for the above it would be a little cleaner and easier to add our own classes to the <a> link and avoid top Category.

Thanks in advance.

3

The way to do that is to use something like

For example

[wrap=link-button][Link Text](http://meta.discourse.org)[/wrap]

renders as

Link Text

and the markup is

<div class="d-wrap" data-wrap="link-button">
  <p>
    <a href="http://meta.discourse.org">Link Text</a>
  </p>
</div>

and you can then style it in CSS using

[data-wrap="link-button"] {
  a {
    // styles for the link
  }
}

You can change [wrap=link-button] to any value you want like

[wrap=custom-button]
or
[wrap=home-link]
or
[wrap=foobar]

and then use that to target the link like the example above.

4

@Johani Very interesting!!! Thanks for your work on this, we will look into this option, it would be great to have in the API docs on Post raw property settings in the future. Or a central doc that groups/defines all possibilities with Post’s UPDATE:/POST: property