by Scott Reilly (coffee2code)

Auto­mat­i­cally hyper­link text URLs and email addresses orig­i­nally writ­ten only as plaintext.

coffee2code.com/wp-plugins/auto-hyperlink-urls/

This plu­gin seeks to replace and extend WordPress’s default auto-hyperlinking func­tion. This plu­gin uses dif­fer­ent pat­tern match­ing expres­sions than the Word­Press default in order to pre­vent inap­pro­pri­ate adja­cent char­ac­ters from becom­ing part of the link (as Word­Press has improved over the years, nowa­days this is just a few edge cases like text links that are braced or brack­eted) and it pre­vents invalid URIs (i.e. blah) from becom­ing links.

More sig­nif­i­cantly, this plu­gin adds con­fig­ura­bil­ity to the auto-hyperlinker such that you can configure:

• If you want text URLs to only show the hostname
• If you want text URLs trun­cated after N characters
• If you want auto-hyperlinked URLs to open in new browser win­dow or not
• If you want the pro­to­col (i.e. “http://”) to be stripped for dis­played links
• The text to come before and after the link text for trun­cated links
• If you want rel=”nofollow” to be supported
• If you wish to sup­port addi­tional domain exten­sions not already con­fig­ured into the plugin

This plu­gin will rec­og­nize any protocol-specified URI (http|https|ftp|news)://, etc, as well as email addresses. It also adds the new abil­ity to rec­og­nize Class B domain ref­er­ences (i.e. “somesite.net”, not just domains prepended with “www.”) as valid links (i.e. “wordpress.org” would get auto-hyperlinked)

The fol­low­ing domain exten­sions (aka TLDs, Top-Level Domains) are rec­og­nized by the plu­gin: com, org, net, gov, edu, mil, us, info, biz, ws, name, mobi, cc, tv. These only comes into play when you have a plain­text URL that does not have an explicit pro­to­col spec­i­fied. If you need sup­port for addi­tional TLDs, you can add more via the plugin’s admin options page.

This plu­gin also acti­vates auto-hyperlinking of text links within post/page content.