This promises to be a very useful tool for webmasters of large sites or sites with many users. Sure, one could always check broken links using server states, but by having a link checking mechanism in the UI you can let each user in a multi-user site be responsible for keeping their own section 404-free.
The CMFlinkchecker program comes in two parts; the user interface (CMFLinkchecker) and the bit that actually crawls the site (LMS). These are distributed as two seperate programs. You can however, just install CMFLinkChecker and then go to ‘link management’ in plone preferences panel and register your website to access LMS on a server kindly provided by the authors somewhere over in Germany. After a couple of goes (the server might have benn down) I eventually got through and was given an id and password via email to enter in the ‘link monitoring server fields’ in the aforementioned ‘link management’ page. After that, I srolled down to the bottom of the page, hit ‘crawl my site for all links’, and got the ball rolling….
For a small site (around 200 links), about 20% of the links were evalusted straight away, the rest were queued up on the server and were ready the next time I logged in. The process probably goes a lot faster if you have LMS installed on your own server.