Managing Blogroll and Links in Latest Update – What happened?

Seems to me like now we’re just screwing with stuff so that we can say that the next version “Has something new!”

I’m with Kopper. I was using the links panel to manage a set of links, and it was easy and well designed. Now I’ve just updated to 2.1.2, and this entire part of the template is FUBAR. Now I have to go into the theme coding to set EACH CATEGORY for how many / what type of listing (random, seq no, etc.)?!

You can say what you want “content vs. presentation methodology,” but that means nothing to anyone except coding philosophers. What I care about is making it easy for me, and my clients, to work with WordPress. How does it make any sense to remove functionality that was working just fine?

Let me add my voice to those dissenting. I’m going to be spending days getting my template to show my blogroll properly again, and am considering deep-sixing the whole damn thing and just going back to maintaining my lists on Blogrolling. The previous setup wasn’t perfect, but it was intuitive and easy to use, and you didn’t have to work out PHP code in order to modify each individual segment.

I think what bothers me most is how condescending and dismissive Otto has consistently been about peoples’ concerns about this particular issue. In this thread and others, I get the feeling that he wants us to quit our damn whining and suck it up. That’s really the most frustrating thing, to see that kind of obliviousness to people’s concerns coming from a representative of a project that’s been such a great alternative to the top-down management of the big software projects. Now, we’re expected to adapt our needs to the WP way of doing things, rather than vice-versa.

I took me awhile to straighten this mess out in my template, too.

Next to categorizing pages, the change I would most like to see is the ability to designate categories as either link categories or post/page categories or both.

A blogroll is a blogroll, a post is a post, and a link is a link. These things are not all the same and I need to be able to treat them differently. Having to change the template by hand to show or hide particular categories every time a new one is added is just a pain and doesn’t fit in with my idea of a good CMS.

As a new user of WordPress I didn’t have anything get broken by the change.

But trying to modify the links thrown up by the default WordPress installation, I felt like I had been left completely high and dry by the (lack of) cues on the admin pages in 2.1.2.

I’m all in favor of pure, abstract code. I’m even OK with occasionally breaking things when there’s a compellingly better way to do it. But I think such things can usually be done while giving users decent cues too. Somewhere on the admin pages there needs to be terminology like “manage links”. Even if it interfaces with completely new code.