Can you select only items that are published and within the correct date period for publishing? Is there also a way of auto updating the name of the item if it is changed?
All the items I am linking to are EPiServer content items in the same site
For presentation you can convert the LinkItems to PageData objects and Filter out the pages that are not published. See http://www.frederikvig.com/2009/06/episerver-extension-methods-part-2/ for more information.