Admin Forum:HTML links (a href)

Maybe I'm stupid (very possible). Is it impossible to add links via simple HTML code (a href...)? I wanted to do something rather complex (the intended result looks like the second row, but with a link on the external image, obviously), but the wiki refuses to render the link properly. It's not my code; it doesn't render links at all unless they're done in wikicode. A bug? A feature? Any way around it? --Tulipclaymore 15:51, March 5, 2012 (UTC)
 * a href doesn't work on Wikia (incidentally, it should be blocked, as it's a good way of filtering out spam bots that are designed to spam links) - you can make an image link to a page by adding |link=pagename to the image code. So Example.png will link to Community Central --  Random Time  16:16, March 5, 2012 (UTC)