External Links

Automatically adds target="_blank" and rel="noopener noreferrer" to every external link in post content. Internal links (same host or subdomains) are left untouched.

Features:

• Zero configuration - install and forget
• Detects external links by comparing the link hostname against APP_URL
• Handles subdomains correctly - docs.yoursite.com is treated as internal
• Strips any existing target or rel attributes before adding the new ones - no duplicates
• Applied via a content body filter - runs once on the rendered HTML, not per-link on the client

Requirements

• Contensio 2.0 or later

Installation

Composer

composer require contensio/plugin-external-links

Manual

Copy the plugin directory and register the service provider via the admin plugin manager.

No migrations or configuration required.

How it works

The plugin hooks into contensio/content/body - a filter that receives the fully-rendered post body HTML as a string and must return the (optionally modified) string.

A preg_replace_callback walks every <a href="https?://..."> tag in the HTML. For each match:

1. The link's hostname is extracted via parse_url()
2. If the hostname matches APP_URL's host (or is a subdomain), the tag is returned unchanged
3. Otherwise, any existing target and rel attributes are removed, and target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer" are appended

The rel="noopener noreferrer" attribute prevents the opened page from accessing window.opener (security) and prevents the referrer header from being sent (privacy).

Hook reference