Version 2.1 and Link Categories – what happened?

I’ve just upgraded to 2.1 – what happened to Link Categories??

I have a lot of custom code that works Categories and Link Categories (in 2.0.4).

Apparently, the linkcategories table was replaced with a lookup table, link2cat. I think this was a mistake, at least from a developer’s perspective.

It’s not just that I’m unhappy about having to rewrite my queries. In terms of performance, this change is a step backwards. Not only are there more rows to search in a consolidated category table, but additional criteria is required to distinguish Link from Post categories.

And for a platform that is supposed to be developer friendly, this is almost an insult. At this stage of the game, the table structure should not have been changed.

Adding injury to insult is the renamed admin menu. Have the WP folks lost their collective minds? Why would the intuitive “Links” be replaced with “Blogroll”?

And what about Link Formatting? No more ‘text_before_link’ and ‘text_after_link’ fields?

Ouch.

Whatever the merits of other changes, version 2.1 is NOT developer friendly!