A change in the links management for WordPress.com greeted me today morning. It was pretty irritating, I had got quite comfortable with the Link Manager interface. The Link Manager was my way of displaying links in a certain order, in certain groups. They are all gone!
Well, actually not. The Link Manager has been transformed into Bookmarks. For all practical purposes we can say that a bookmark is our good old link. Managing bookmarks, adding and importing still function the same way. What seems to have disappeared is management of link categories! In Bookmark Management you can still filter the bookmarks by categories, but there is no place for category management!
The link categories are now merged into post categories. You will see them listed in the Manage -> Categories interface. The Manage Categories also shows an additional column for the number of bookmarks in a category.
However, there was some change in behavior too.
- The biggest being that there is no differentiation between a post category and a bookmark category now. In the earlier version, I could choose the sorting and the order of display of bookmarks in the bookmark category properties. There goes by list of popular posts! Their ranks are not being used anywhere, they are being displayed alphabetically. I probably have to start using the text widget for this too, till a popular posts widget is ready. It will be difficult in themes like Regulus and Hemingway which do not support widgets yet.
- Earlier, link categories with invisible bookmarks were not being displayed, now they are being shown empty in the sidebar. If you don’t want those categories to be displayed, delete bookmarks within that category.
- Also, what is missing is the convenience of moving bookmarks from one category to another with just one submit. No way of doing that now!
I am not sure whether this is the final version, but this sure has made me a little uncomfortable.
An unrelated change is that the post categories for a post now link to the category archives instead of the WordPress global tags :-). Hehe, it was short-lived.
Technorati tags: wordpress.com, wordpress+link+manager, bookmarks, link categories
Copyright Abhijit Nadgouda.
