TYPO3 Core

Per definition a caption is not the place to to put links in. If you have content elements eg. images with a text overlay, then you are good advised to create a new content element that fits the purpose.

In your screenshot I can see, that you already have placed a link. So your way is in this case to modify your fluid template to wrap the link from the link-field around the caption and put the item-description from the title or title-override-field in front of it.

One thing to mention is:

It is "think about worth" to add a dropdown field to the fal items (by core) which delivers a purpose select field out of the constants or page/user ts. Tha way it is possible to change the behavior per item out of the usecase perspective. If you agree, feel free to add an issue for that.

I don't agree on "Per definition a caption is not the place to to put links in". If it's allowed in HTML, we should leave it up to the editor to make use of it.

The Purpose of a CMS is to make content editing easy. So, if we decide to support Links within captions, it should consequently be made easy. If we don't want to allow links in captions, fine, then turn it off. But what I don't like is bad user experience.

Using the link-field of the whole CE doesn't work either, because I need different download links for different images. Currently, I also don't see any alternative out-of-the-box way to create nicely formatted image captions containing links, for example in the RTE. If you see an alternative, I'd be happy to try it.

The easiest way to fix this would be to enable RTE or better something more restrictive, like a "tag helper" to allow basic text formatting like "bold" and "link". Maybe we could use this also in other places.

A possibility could be overwriting the TCA and change that field to an RTE; I would suggest you to join the #typo3-cms channel in Slack if you need support.

Maybe it is not direclty related, but with the recent security updates, now HTML is not allowed by default in a caption ( http://typo3.org/teams/security/security-bulletins/typo3-core/typo3-core-sa-2015-013/)

I don't have a strong demand for this feature anymore, but in general I think that the security argument does not stand in the way to create a GUI.
Please see this discussion: https://decisions.typo3.org/t/final-decision-on-the-flash-message-rendering/352. Some sort of "BBcode" style language may solve the problem.

Moritz Ahl wrote:

I don't have a strong demand for this feature anymore, but in general I think that the security argument does not stand in the way to create a GUI.

It prevents us from simply enabling the RTE at this place. We strife for providing a safe base for developing projects with TYPO3. If requirements in your project demand that there is some kind of markup for image captions, you are free to change the default configuration to enable/add this. In this case the responsibility lies with you to secure your setup and ensure that no malicious code can be injected.

Please see this discussion: https://decisions.typo3.org/t/final-decision-on-the-flash-message-rendering/352. Some sort of "BBcode" style language may solve the problem.

Yes, that might help and could be considered for other locations too. Care to tackle this? :-)