Add custom attributes to the General Link field and have it work in Experience Editor and Content Editor

Question

I would like to add a couple of custom fields for Dataattributes on links and to add in NoFollow for the link in Sitecore 8.2 update 2 and above.

So NoFollow would be a check box and Dataattributes would be a single line text.

The issue is that I have done this before using SPEAK and it works great in the content editor but when you get into the Experience editor, depending on the type of link (internal, external, anchor) Sitecore uses a combination of SPEAK and SheerUI.

I do not want to completely convert everything to SheerUI.

How do I get these custom attributes to work in both Content Editor and Experience Editor?

Answer 1

I wanted to post the answer to this question. Resolving this requires you to deal with both SPEAK and SheerUI for various components. Some are in speak and the other depending on the type of link are in Sheer.

Get Sitecore Rocks as you will need to modify the SPEAK UI. This is quite involved and has been documented in detail in this blog post of mine:

https://www.akshaysura.com/2017/04/07/dont-speak-i-know-just-what-youre-saying-sitecore-speak-customize-general-link-with-nofollow-checkbox/