Adding rel="nofollow" and target="_blank" attributes to links in django project

After googling for a while for a plugin to automatically  add  rel="nofollow" and target="_blank" attributes to all html a tags for my Django blog, nothing was found but this one called md_nofollow by bhch. 

Unfortunately, this plugin doesn't work for my blog, maybe its because of the version of python markdown. So I decided  to write my own one.

Requirements¶

python markdown 3.x.x, see here for installation

since the APIs are different with versions of python markdown, so this is important.

python_markdown_nofollow¶

the name of this plugin is python_markdown_nofollow, you can easily install this plugin by command:

pip install python-markdown-nofollow

Example¶

here is a detailed example of how to use this plugin for your django blog.

template tags¶

in the frontend, we use a template tag to translate markdown syntax to html like:

{{ blog.content|std_markdown|safe }}

in my app directory, I create a directory called templatetags:

    ├── app
    │   ├── templatetags
    │       ├── std_markdown.py

and under templatetags directory we create a file called std_markdown.py

in the std_markdown.py file we are going to do the translation from markdown to html:

from django import template
from django.template.defaultfilters import stringfilter

import markdown # import python markdown

register = template.Library()


@register.filter()
@stringfilter
def std_markdown(value):
    return markdown.markdown(value, extensions=[
        'markdown.extensions.fenced_code',
    ])

after doing this, our front will work well with a link looks like (use the inspect of a browers):

<a href='https://stdworkflow.com'>external link</a>

Use python_markdown_nofollow¶

now we integrate python_markdown_nofollow to our translator by simply adding:

def std_markdown(value):
    return markdown.markdown(value, extensions=[
        'python_markdown_nofollow',
        ...
    ])

restart our project, in our front end we will see:

<a href='https://stdworkflow.com' rel="external nofollow" target="_blank">external link</a>

Why use python_markdown_nofollow¶

well, if you have learnt something about SEO, you may know it is good to add rel="nofollow" attribute for external links in our websites, which would be good for the SEO of our site.

Since the targets of this plugin are all the <a> tags in our content, which may include links of our own site, so external nofollow rather than nofollow was used.

sources of python_markdown_nofollow¶

this plugin was released on:

https://pypi.org/project/python-markdown-nofollow/0.0.1/

https://github.com/stdworkflow/python_markdown_nofollow