Let's say you have a page that needs to be very long. You've got lots of content and you want to display it all on one page. To make things easier for your site visitors, you want to create links that will take them directly to the various sections of the page instead of having to scroll up and down manually. This is where anchors come in.

Consider this really long web page (click to see)

This is a really long page as you can see. There may be reasons why it needs to be this long, so there some links at the top that outline the five sections of the page.

Our goal will be to use anchors for each of the five sections so that a site visitor can simply click on the links at the top and be taken to the corresponding section without having to scroll down the page.

Step One - Define the Anchors

Before links can be created, we must first create the anchors. Go to the page you wish to create anchors on and push the Edit button to start editing the page.

Let's start and the bottom and work our way up. Scroll down to the very last section and click just to the left of the Section Five subheading.

Choose a paragraph style in the left column.

Any text on your page with that formatting will appear in the list of choices.

You can only associate anchors with the formatting options you see in the left column. "Normal" styling isn't one of the options.

Notice that when you first create the anchor, the targeted text appears twice. Simply push backspace to get rid of the redundant text. (an alternative method of inserting anchors is to highlight the text, which may change the appearance of the text).

If you repeat Step One for each section of your page, you will have built a library of anchors. These anchors can be selected as a link target via internal link from any page.

Step Two - Internal Link

Now that you have your anchors defined, you are ready to put them into use. At the top of the example page there is a sort of table of contents that lists the name of each section (one through five). We'll start by inserting an internal link for Section Five.

Linking to an anchor works almost like an other internal link, except that you must choose the proper anchor from the Link to Anchor list on the right.

In addition to the familiar top of page (default) selection, notice that there is now one anchor for each section of my long web page. These anchors can be used as link targets from any page, not just the same page that the anchors happen to be on.

Step Three - Manage Your Anchors

If you need to view a list of your anchors, delete some anchors, or generate a linked list of your anchors you need to use the Manage Anchors and Table of Contents tabs.

You should see three tabs along the top of the Anchors window like these:

Manage Anchors lets you view and delete anchors. You must click on a paragraph style from the list on the far left to get a view of which anchors are associated with that style. Here's what this looks like using the example from above:

To delete an anchor, simply uncheck one of the boxes and click ok in the bottom right corner of the window. Keep in mind that you cannot delete an anchor that is being used, such as Section Five, in this example. Used anchors will appear with a grayed-out checkbox.

Table of Contents will generate a list of links that automatically link to each of your anchors. Select a group of anchors, then choose the paragraph style you want the link list to use on the right.

Click ok in the bottom right corner of the window to generate your Table of Contents. The result with the above settings looks like this on a page:

Each of these links is set to link to each corresponding anchor positioned down this really long page.

That's all there is to using anchors on your Plone website. The concept is simple, but it will probably take a little practice to master their use. Keep in mind that anchors are an interesting way of customizing how links work, but the standard top of page link is by far the most common on the web today.