Links to media items on external sitecore sites and Sitecore 6.5

Just ran into an interresting problem a while ago, with a Sitecore 6.5 solution we made a while back.

It seems like there is a bug in Sitecore 6.5, that has been fixed in later versions of Sitecore 6.5

I'm writing here, so people having the same problem knows that an upgrade fixes it.

Now, lets image we have created the website http://www.mywebsite.org for a customer, and they want to link to latest price list from one of their suppliers, who is also running Sitecore.

The supplier has the website http://www.supplier.org , and their pricelist is located at http://www.supplier.org/~/media/Files/PriceList.pdf .

Our editor at mywebsite would like to link to this, so he creates a new article, and inserts a link to this file using the Rich Text editor in Sitecore.

Once he saves the link, it is saved correctly to the database - however, when the frontend renders the link, it tries to expand it, which results in the following link getting rendered: http://www.supplier.org/http://www.mywebsite.org/~/media/Files/PriceList.pdf , which ofcause does not work.

The good news is, that the link manager we rewritten late in Sitecore 6.5 , so upgrading to the newest version of Sitecore 6.5, or Sitecore 6.6 would solve this problem.

So, if you are creating a new solution, there is nothing to worry about, since you really should be using the newest version of Sitecore anyway - but if you have some old solutions, where people hits this bug, the easy fix is to upgrade. (There is a workaround which replaces parts of the link manager, which I'm not gonna go into details with).